Maybe the bureau got to me, but I liked it..

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2011)

Call me crazy, call me a sucker, call me Ishmael, OK don't call me that, but I like this movie.
Is it some kind of genius? Not quite. Is it thrilling? Not really. Is it shocking? Hardly. Was it predictable at times? Yeah.
OK, so maybe I don't know why I liked this movie. Matt Damon is Matt Damon, you can sort of tell that he's acting. He has a square head by the way, according to my GF.
So Matt falls in love with a "dancer", sheesh, could it get any worse? And yet, somehow, I didn't hate the movie. Not-so-mysterious men walk around with magic hats that take them through magic doorways, a familiar plot device in Hollywood, and yet, I didn't hate this movie.
The movie is either ham-fisted or more subtle than most people realized. OK, they could have played the paranoid angle up a lot more, but IMO that would be a boring cliché'.
What's interesting here is that nothing is really that big of a surprise to the characters, Matt Damon's character and his love interest both seem weirdly OK with everything that is happening. Maybe I'm reading something into it that was unintended, regardless, I see their moderate reaction to everything as representative of our constant awareness of things. You know, the sense that things are wrong or OK, that gut feeling, and when it turns out you're right it's less of a shock. If a bureau were constantly mussing in our lives I think we would develop a sense that maybe things aren't as they should be, or that something outside our control exists.
It's not a brilliant work, but it's not a pile of trash either, it's actually a very skillfully handled movie that unfortunately has left a lot of the movie going public missing the subtlety and not connecting the dots.
8 out of 10 for skillful handling.