A sequence of missed opportunities

Rating: 4/10 (8 April 2004)

I have a hard time believing that this is the best these people were able to do with this cast and this material. I have no idea why young aspiring actors like Matt Damon, Julia Stiles and Franka Potente (please ask Tom Tykwer to give you a decent role again, Franka) felt compelled to play roles in this movie.
The script must have looked like a mess, with the line "...moving swiftly along now..." printed at least three times per page. Okay, the scenes are probably in sequence, but there is no continuity or natural flow of events. The editing is pretty shoddy as well. Looks like someone tried to fit material based on a 10,000 page script into a 100 page time frame.
The camera work made me nervous and giddy for all the wrong reasons (it is a Steadicam, not a Shakycam, guys! And this isn't NYPD Blue!). The production values are hardly any higher than in a low-budget Dolph Lundgren action movie, destined to go straight to video.
The movie opens on a ship, so of course the camera is tilting left and right... This is way beyond a tired cliche, it is tedious and distracting, and the tilting is overdone to a degree that I actually wondered why the actors (or the camera man) did not fall over.
Talking about cliches .. there we have those amazing 'CIA computers' again, that can do anything in a few seconds. So we have a blurry cam picture shot from half a mile away; zooming in actually sharpens the picture (!), and three seconds later we know that this person paid a bill in Belgium three months ago - in font size 25 and spawning at least 15 wildly animating processes on-screen. This worked fine when a PC cost $50,000 dollars and 95% of the audience had never heard of them, but come on .. Database queries aren't that spectacular, even with the CIA's budget.
There appears to be no cinematography or 'photographic pride' at all (not even one single nice and captivating shot). It looks like it was a TV movie filmed in the shortest possible time, on a limited budget, and with several people already thinking about their next project (and rightly so).

I know, a spy thriller can do with a bit of suspended disbelief, but there is so much distraction and nonsense going on, and the characters and action are so close to caricature, that disbelief hits you over the head most of the time. Instead of pulling the viewer into the train of events, the pace and the editing leave only one lasting impression: did they try to finish the movie in time before dinner?
This movie could have done a lot better with a slower and more even pace, a leaner and tighter script, classier 'cinematic' camera work, and way less editing. Less balls, better juggling.