Pretty good except for the Idiot Plot problem

Rating: 7/10 (27 August 2012)

"The Adjustment Bureau" is nothing new, so its success depends on how well it's done. The butterfly-effect genre, of which this film is an example, is based on a concept in chaos theory that relates the sensitivity of outcomes and recurrences to initial conditions. There are of course 3 movies with that name, but the genre predates the development of chaos theory; it goes all the way back to It's A Wonderful Life. Other examples include Sliding Doors, the TV show Sliders, possibly The Asphalt Jungle, and countless time-travel pieces including Timecrimes and Back to the Future. Ray Bradbury's classic short story A Sound of Thunder, based on (literally) the butterfly effect, was made into a film in which the original story is almost unrecognizable. The Adjustment Bureau conflates this with the conspiracy-theory hidden-forces-at-work nobody-really-knows-what's-going-on genre, which was the explicit motif of Men in Black and is also a theme (major or minor) of The X-Files, Rubicon, Area 51 and Roswell and most UFO stuff, the Alien films, Fringe, The Prisoner, Independence Day and on and on.
The Adjustment Bureau has the advantages of a big budget and major actors. It's set in New York City rather than Toronto doubling for Chicago/Boston/Seattle, etc. (although I don't know, these days you can do practically anything with CGI). The supporting actors are competent, especially John Slattery as Richardson. Matt Damon is almost but not quite convincing as Brooklyn-born New York politician David Norris, and Emily Blunt is captivating and irresistible as aspiring ballerina Elise Sellas. Blunt is 13 years younger than Damon, but there's a lot of that in movies and on TV, and their chemistry is undeniable. David runs for the U.S. Senate and at the moment of his defeat, he encounters Elise. He accidentally witnesses the activities of The Adjustment Bureau, which is a shadowy organization of seemingly superhuman operatives run by The Chairman (you're supposed to infer that The Chairman is God). He learns that there is a Plan that includes literally everyone and everything, that he and everyone else have their assigned roles in the Plan, and that sorry, according to the Plan, he and Elise are not meant to be together. If he doesn't like that, well, it's just too bad. If one's free will conflicts with the Plan, the Plan wins. Oh, and if he tells anyone, he'll be "reset," meaning brain-wiped. The rest of the film is about his attempts to find Elise and to keep the Bureau from separating them again, all the while working on his political comeback. The story is generally well told, although the narrative is a bit jerky and uneven in places.
However, The Adjustment Bureau, for all its great qualities, suffers from a fatal Idiot-Plot flaw: If you were David, and a woman just sort of materializes and Kismet whacks you across the face like a 2x4, wouldn't you ask her name? And then later on, when you meet her on a bus and she tells you her name, what kind of idiot NYC resident wouldn't ask her for her last name? And what kind of idiot woman wouldn't give it? Yes, I have lived in big cities all my life and I know about women who are reluctant to give out their last names to people they've just met, but good grief, she gave him her phone number. You watch this film and you scream, either mentally or out loud, "For heaven's sake, ask her her last name!" and "For heaven's sake, tell him your last name!" but to no avail. Also, the deus ex machina ending (literally, not figuratively) is a bit too neat.