The Boring Ordeal of Benjamin Gump

Rating: 1/10 (26 January 2009)

This film was an overly long, excruciatingly boring heap of pretentious trash. The cinematography and direction was great. Everything else was pathetic, boring, or unintentionally funny.
Brad Pitt has made a lucrative career on his good looks. He can't, however, act his way out of a paper bag. He displays three ranges of emotions : mouth closed, mouth one quarter open, and mouth half open. His character, like Forest Gump, was a Southern dimwit; except it was devoid of humor. The plain looking English woman who had an affair with him in Russia must have been extremely desperate to hit on a sixty-something wrinkled old bespectacled man who had the personality of a traumatized hamster. What - she ran out of batteries?
Cate Blanchett looked horrendous. Did you ever see the transvestite in "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls"? Dead ringer. Her makeup had to have been applied with a trowel by System Pavers, the company that paved my driveway last summer. She looks like that weird puppet in those "Saw" flicks. Such an unattractive woman in a leading role ruined the film. Pitt seemed to be getting cuter while she kept getting uglier. The movie became bogged down in this dull love affair. How could this woman ever generate passion from a Tibetan monk strung out on Viagra, let alone Brad Pitt, was beyond me. It was unintentionally funny when Pitt met his teenage daughter. The poor girl inherited her mother's looks. That bit in Paris where they had an extended "what if" sequence of events prior to the pedestrian/car accident was ludicrous. The silly twit forgot to look while crossing - so what?
Faune A. Chambers, who played Pitt's adoptive mom characterized the most blatant, obnoxious stereotypical black person ever seen on film since the 1930's. I felt like standing up and shouting, "Okay, we get it - she's black!" Why the NAACP didn't boycott her performance, I'll never know. She made Stepin' Fetchitt seem like James Earl Jones.
This film was Forest Gump meets Boring Chick Flick. The ending caught me by surprise. I thought he was going to regress into a sperm.