1 Dimensional Characters in a Slick Script

Rating: 6/10 (3 October 2016)

I wanted to love it, I wanted to be captivated, I wanted to be taken for a ride of action, mystery, and suspense. And well It was like ordering your favorite meal only to bite into it and find it sorta tasted like it was supposed to. You keep chewing trying to love it but it's just a bit off. That's this film.
It plays out like a slick mystery novel - everything revolves around the narrative and everything happens to conveniently fit perfectly in place.
While this isn't bad necessarily it comes at the expense of the characters being more interesting. Even with the all star cast line up it doesn't do much to give anything more than a cardboard cut out for the characters.
How this won an academy award is certainly a wonder. Either the competition that year was terrible, or the judges simply looked at the names in the credit roll and felt like in order to keep their jobs they had to vote for it.
The movie opens up laboriously slow trying to give you a background and history of the main characters, but what it fails to do is make you feel connected to the characters - it comes off slow and trite. It's just too forced and almost feels like a soap opera for the first 15-2 minutes.
The major low in the film is when Billy somehow is supposed to fall in love with Madolyn and vice versa. The movie makes about as much effort to sell you on it as a bad porno. IE: Therapist girl gives one session with Billy, kicks him out. And then somehow a few scenes later they're knocking boots. It was just so terribly unrealistic or believable, but then again most other things in this film are. Now film works by the viewers suspending but this film just fails to really engage the viewer with the characters which would then allow you to suspend belief. So many things in this film come off as trite.
Overall a watchable film but despite it's all star line up it's a very forgettable film.