Should have known from the title this would be long and boring...

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2008)

I don't mind long movies. A 3 hour movie can go by in a snap while a crappy 90 minute movie might seem like 3 hours. There's a good movie somewhere in this meandering mess but would have required a few more rewrites to get there. The only tension is between Casey Affleck's character who loves Jesse James the legend and slowly he sees his image being torn down. But there's too many bloated scenes of unnecessary subplots that make you want to hit the FF button.
One thing this does prove is that Brad Pitt does not have the chops to carry a film as a leading man. He's trying, but he's not really acting. In this film he's actually kind of hammy. And there were points in the movie when Casey Affleck's purposely whiny, cracking voice almost seemed like I was watching an actor on Saturday Night Live mocking him. I haven't seen a voice that annoying come out of an actors mouth since Mos Def in 16 BLOCKS. If the whiny Affleck doesn't change his schtick, people are going to be laughing out loud at his next flick. Although he was good in Gone Baby Gone.
Why they stole the narrative style from The PBS Civil War Documentaries makes sense, I guess, but they beat it to death so much you just wanted it to stop as well. If I want to watch PBS I'll watch PBS, not pay 12 bucks to see it in a theater. And what's with the 'sepia tone' thing happening in Hollywood these days? If you show us a film in sepia tone we're automatically going to think its good? Didn't work in another snooze-fest 'Flags of our Fathers' and it didn't work here.
My guess is Pitt, as producer, exerted some control over this and tried to make a 'film' not a movie and he ended up doing neither. I watched half of this on my own, then started it again the next night with my girlfriend and she didn't even want to finish watching it. AND she's the biggest Brad Pitt fan there is! It is completely devoid of any narrative tension and has no other qualities about it to make it worth watching. All the performances are banal. A complete waste of time. This makes you long for the days of the studio system when actors would be forced to make good movies. Too many actors with too much power thinking they know what it takes to make a good movie.
Stay away from this one!