Funny idea going nowhere

Rating: 5/10 (4 January 2009)

I remember gaining respect for Brad Pitts acting abilities in 12 Monkeys as he broke his calm eye-candy type casting. I've been following him ever since hoping for him to be involved in a project where he stepped outside his comfort zone. I understand that he does movies like Oceans and Mr & Mrs Smith and that's all good but when it comes for him to pick movies with substance he always fails for some reason.
Right now I'm asking myself whether it's because of the projects themselves or it's because he gets involved with them? Babel was in no way near to how good it could have been after I heard the pitch. Burn after reading is nothing but a over-hyped mess and now we have ole Benjamin Button.
After watching the trailer I thought it might be a pretty cool story and it actually looked like Mr Pitt would be doing some acting overall. Alas the story struggled to combine a life and love story with a quirky but great original idea and failed.
You will know that you have been tricked from the first scene with two women in a hospital and they start reading from Benjamin's journal. From then on the story continues to test our ability to stay alert and interested. We get excited about seeing just how well faces can be digitized and there are other great cinematic achievements within the movie but we can't very well say that the acting is one of them.
Brad Pitt just goes with the flow, like Forest Gump only without the personality, and basically just stands around looking good. Cate's character is so all over the place that you never get any indication of what type of person she is, there is no depth to her at all.
When all is said and done you leave the theater thinking "wow, they could really make Brad Pitt look old and young". As for the movie itself you will remember it as boring and full of clichés desperately trying to cater to our emotions but it just can't get there.
It was a funny and original idea, it just didn't go anywhere at all.