Disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (23 December 2006)

I went in this one really wanting to like it. What an incredible concept! But the film just didn't do a thing for me.
Firstly, I find it hard to suspend my disbelief to buy Matt Damon as a 20 year-old college junior. He was just plain old 34 year-old Matt. THEN six years later, he has a son and talks to him on overseas long distance and Matt looks exactly the same except he has changed his eyeglass frames...he is supposed 26 yet still looks 34. THEN, fifteen years later, Matt has changed his eyeglass frames again but now his son is 20 years-old and Matt is STILL only 34. When these two are together as father and son, it just kills any other aspect of what the story is attempting to tell us because NO ONE can buy into Matt Damon's son only being 14 years younger than himself.
The least DeNiro could have done was to put a little grey hair at Matt's temples or buy him a different suit of clothes. In a film full of flashbacks covering a 22 year period, it is vital to make your characters age and progress through life.
Oh yeah, I absolutely COULD NOT buy Angelina Jolie as a 20 year-old debutante. And the most frequent comment I heard in the lobby following the film was observations about Matt and Angelina's gay son with the deformed giant upper lip...very distracting and horrible casting on the grown son actor.
But putting the casting aside, the thread that unites the tale into a whole and pulls along to the conclusion of the story is totally nonexistent. Sure, I saw some of the old fabled myths of CIA lore stabbed at rather listlessly like the LSD-25 scene. Actually, the LSD suicide via window jumping was supposedly a CIA agent and not a Soviet operative. And the whole planting of locusts in South America by the CIA in order to foil the Zapatistas politico/economic strategy has pretty much been discredited over the years. But this IS, after all, a fanciful telling of a single person's vantage of the period so I guess it is not that important.
But there were incredibly disjointed scenes that did nothing for the story and barely did anything for character development. For instance, Joe Pesci appearing for several minutes of noncontributing story points just so Matt Damon's character can say, "America, the rest of you are just visiting" was a waste of time and illuminated nothing about Cuba, the Mob or the CIA's relationship with the Mob. Or why is Matt's son in Africa hooking up with black girls? Is Matt's son supposed to be a CIA agent at that point? Is he giving up dirty tricks to the other side? What did he do with the information he overheard in the bath tub? Was he still just a college boy? You really cannot nail down time periods regarding the son because he ages even less than his parents once he becomes an adult.
And a most irritating bit of prop management is it appears that Matt Damon's character wore the same trench coat and hat from 1939 to 1961. I am sure they were of the highest quality but I just don't see these items being worn every single business day for over twenty years and still looking serviceable.
Like I said, I really wanted to enjoy this movie but after three hours of my life sitting there waiting for the big reveal, it just ended. I cannot recommend this one to friends unless they are willing to wait for DVD rental or, better yet, HBO release. Sorry.