Nice try......

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2008)

This film has been praised for its realism and criticized for being boring. Both characteristics are accurately described, but neither is specifically the reason that this film is a failure.
'The Good Shepherd' is built out of the reality of spying, if one is liberal about specifics, but what brings it down is that the film not only views the history of the CIA through the prism of one man's life, it tries to CAPTURE the whole of the CIA's official history, and trap it beneath a petty everyman character. With so much officious history stuffed into one banal character, the film becomes a long series of setup pieces, the minor establishing scenes that set the stage for a film's central, and subsidiary dramas. Rather than effective storytelling, we have an official biopic gone bad, with all the tedium and boredom that this implies. Many of the scenes have a peculiar sort of corpse-like realism, with no element specifically and obviously wrong, but with a truncated cast and petty scale giving the lie to the matter.
This is a film that tells, not shows, and by trying to tell the story of the whole CIA, it ends up with little story on screen. This is poor film-making. The acting is generally to a high standard, but major characters are miscast, and the protagonist, as one example, does not effectively transition from college student, to disillusioned middle aged functionary. The concept for this film probably looked interesting , but the reality is a failure.