Pretty awful in almost every way

Rating: 3/10 (26 February 2008)

I first saw this movie in Cinemas when it came out, and was originally very disappointed in it. However, after having the misfortune to see it again recently, I realise I was overly generous with my initial feelings about it.
The film is awful. The acting is uniformly bad, though the actors aren't helped by a dreadful script. It spends too much time pretending to be cool and admiring how supposedly hip it is, rather than telling an engaging story. The characters are cardboard, and thoroughly dislikable, though that description might be too flattering for Di Caprio's character of Richard.
At the start of the film we here a brief bored sounding voice-over by Di Caprio, where he states, 'My name is Richard. That's all you need to know.' It's possibly the most redundant and laughable use of voice-over I have ever heard. And the movie gradually gets worse from here on in.
Embarrassing 'fantasy' moments, such as when Richard abruptly goes insane, and the film turns into a bizarre computer game for a minute or so, drags the film down to new levels of cringeworthyness.
The ending is also terrible. Di Caprio is sitting in a fancy internet café somewhere, and downloads a picture he has been emailed - it is of all his old 'friends' from the island, in a group smiling at the camera. Di Caprio smiles at this, with a hint of nostalgia, as if to say it was great fun after all, and that perhaps the experience was even worthwhile. This, even though several of the people in the photograph died gruesome deaths, he killed one of them, was shunned by his mates, and had a gun pointed at his head by another (a disgusting character played by Tilda Swinton).
I really can't stop thinking of enough bad things to say about this film, so I'll be generous and stop there.
Danny Boyle, why did you not retire after making this atrocity?