Pace OK; but too much foreshadowing

Rating: 4/10 (25 February 2007)

The Good Shepherd held my interest, so i did not consider its timing to be too slow. Those who were looking for an action picture or a thriller (which most movies about the CIA are) would be understandably disappointed.
Max Damon gave an excellent performance as an unemotional intelligence operative.
My main objection to the movie is that major events were long foreshadowed and that the major plot device (a movie clip from which additional information needed to be extracted) ended up making little sense.
Three killings were foreshadowed, with the first victim walking knowingly to meet is attackers, and the third with the viewer merely wondering how the killing would be performed and if others would be "collateral damage".
Another irritant was that supposed highly suspicious intelligence operatives continually opened packages from unknown sources without taking the most minimal precautions against them containing bombs. And a gift from an enemy agent was stored for years in a secure location without it being carefully examined.
These problems spoiled the movie for me.
**************************** SPOILER WARNING ***************************
In the major plot device, a grainy noisy movie that is passed to Edward Wilson is analyzed at greater and greater levels of sophistication in order to determine information which was intentionally masked in its production in order to determine where it was filmed and what was edited out. But it turns out that the point of passing the film to Wilson was for Wilson to come to the spot portrayed so that he could be blackmailed. If this is the point, why is all the masking done on the film -- to determine if the CIA has the capability to obtain the partially masked information?
Clover's seduction of an unwilling Edward Wilson was so blatant, that i kept expecting that it would turn out that she was already pregnant, but this issue appears to not have been considered by the extremely suspicious Wilson (nor the film makers).
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And a question: Were the pages in Ulysses blank when Wilson rifled through them? I saw this on the big screen, so could not back up to check, but they certainly appeared to be.