Pretentiously Absurd

Rating: 3/10 (23 March 2008)

A dull plodding work, pretentiously earnest at best, that could benefit from being trimmed by an hour and excluding the distracting cameos. While constructed in an exercise in literary cinema, the viewer is treated to a CIA history taken from the archives of pop culture and urban myth. Best viewed at home with a finger on the forward button. Is it written in Matt Damon's contract that he doesn't age while his co-star, the most decidedly un-WASPy Angelina Jolie, must play a hag worthy of the first act of Macbeth? The theme of corruption played out in career and family has been done before better in the "Godfather" trilogy, which Deniro must have known. Incidentally, the Bay of Pigs failed in much the same way as way as most military operations do when they run into swampland, but in this movie character, and not geography is destiny.