A movie that's born good and gets progressively worse

Rating: 3/10 (27 January 2009)

Benjamin Button starts out very promisingly as a well-acted, well-paced film with an interesting premise. It's funny, a bit unorthodox, and the events in the film, in Forrest Gump-ian fashion, aren't directly related to each other but further the plot and character development.
Maybe it's an amazingly clever meta-joke, but as the film went on its plot regressed in complexity, relying more and more on worn out movie clichés and schlocky melodrama. By about halfway through, it's a straight-up chick flick, before becoming a daytime soap opera. The "aging in reverse" plot is more or less abandoned here, and when the movie returns to it, almost as an afterthought, near the end, there are no surprising twists to enliven the movie's deadening pace. What you expect to happen is exactly what does happen.