A star each for the photography and Candian locations

Rating: 2/10 (4 September 2010)

When the photography and landscape are the best and only good elements to a film, it is bad. Indeed both photography and location are time used covers for a bad film and this one is really awful.
What's wrong with it can be summed up in Billy Wilder's comment about Titanic: Where's the story in that? In this film it lacks any dram at all, it has been written and conceived as a extended Ken Burns' historical film. But like the magisterial series Burns did on the Civil War the explication and narration of events clarifies and reveals, it is not dramatic unless the use of that word is so misunderstood.
In "The assassination...." the same strategy is used with voice over narrating what is being shown on screen. That is not bad: it's not even admissible to film school, its so bad. Nothing is dramatized, the dialog has all the characters talking in similar cadence and the central relationship between James and Ford is left ambiguous, when it is the crux of the film.
The result is a bloated, pompous, and over long movie; of course, as if the narcoleptic effects of such a long film will add significance to it. No it won't and it will join 'Heaven's Gate' and 'Days of Heaven' as failures.