At Last, A Movie For People With ADD!

Rating: 3/10 (6 March 2011)

There are many movies with impossible plots that are entertaining because you are carried along by the story. You don't notice the holes in the plot until the next day. In this case, the plot is not merely preposterous, it is transparent. As such, it is impossible to enjoy the movie because you are sitting in the theatre analyzing its faults. Let's begin with the idea that Matt Damon looks for his true love for 3 years after their chance meeting. O.K., so I didn't realize until the next day that his true love had crashed a wedding and that she was last seen being chased by security people much faster than she was. Matt could simply have checked back at the hotel to learn her identity. But even while I was watching the movie it was obvious that he plays a well-known public figure. So why didn't she just call him up? Once you realize this is all she would have to do, the premise of the movie collapses. In addition, as other reviewers have noted, the human hero is outwitting God. How believable is that? The angels suggest that God just doesn't have the resources to monitor everybody, so He focuses on "important" people. That's simply annoying. This is a God who (rather than knowing when any sparrow falls) apparently only knows when a condor falls. And then you have the angel who violates God's orders to help our hero find his true love by loaning him his cheesy hat. I could only think of the Red Hat Ladies. Where do they end up when they go though a door? I've never read (or heard of) the scifi novel from the 50's that this is based on, but I recognized the genre when it was postulated that all the large events of Western Civilization could be explained by times that God intervened and times when God took a hands-off approach: God was on-duty up to the Fall of Rome, but took the day off during the Dark Ages, etc. Other reviewers quibble that this ignores other cultures, but 1950's scifi was into sweeping concepts like this. Frankly, it is kinda neat, and as a teenager I would have been intrigued. But the problem here is that Hollywood has taken what was probably a pretty good idea from the 50's and trashed it. I'd bet that the author made a much more credible case for his premise and tied up the loose ends in a way that was internally consistent. Not so here. I give three stars because of the scenes of New York and because smoking was not prominently featured. Even Big Tobacco passed on this turkey.