For a deep film, it was rather shallow

Rating: 5/10 (31 December 2006)

This is the kind of film that mistakes obtuseness for mystery. Damon plays Wilson, the sort of emotionally stunted character he specializes in, but because the writing gives little depth to any of the characters and the editing leaves us floundering in random vignettes, I didn't really care that this CIA man in the gray flannel trench coat ignored his tramp wife and his awkward son.
There's just not a lot of story here, by which I mean any solid details that really explain any of the actions in the film. What information was Wilson's homosexual mentor in danger of revealing that merited his murder? Who really was his son's African lover? If she'd had more than 10 seconds of screen time, maybe I'd care that she was thrown out of an airplane. And, most importantly, who was Wilson's wife? As played by Jolie, she starts out as a young woman who improbably hikes up her skirt a few hours after meeting a dull Wilson, and then morphs into some long-suffering wife in pearls. Please.
As for the message of the film, DeNiro throws in so many so randomly: his "Wild Bill" Donovan character stating that the CIA needs civilian oversight in an unsubtle but pointless dig at Bush's War on Terror, the doomed Russian turncoat stating that the Soviet Union was a paper tiger the U.S. used to justify its imperialism, or Wilson's weird comment to Pesci's mob character that the CIA was about keeping the WASPs on top.
In the end, DeNiro sought to create a film with such an intelligent message that he could get away with assuming his viewers knew enough about the Bay of Pigs or Guatemala in 1954 or post-war Berlin to get them through all the faint connections. The problem is: by the time it all comes together in the last 30 minutes or so, we still don't know enough about the characters to care.