Mediocre at best....

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2006)

I fully expected this to be a good movie. What with all the hype, the star studded cast and the subject matter - heck freaking' Deniro directed! Sadly, I found myself bored and underwhelmed. This movie was shot beautifully and the acting was excellent, although a bit on the stoic side. The plot, however, was convoluted and the pacing was slow and at times a bit on the silly side. Jumping back and forth through time, theoretically, makes sense to explain events. But in this case, it seemed out of place - events weren't always explained and there was little relationship from one scene to the next. Matt Damon was pretty good, but not great. He never aged a day even though this movie takes place in a 20+ year time cycle from Damon's character in college to his later years. Damon is supposed to be the father of a 22-24 year old kid in this movie, but looks exactly the same as when his character was 18-21. There is a lot of time spent on character and relationship development, but not enough on what I felt were more compelling stories and too much on other, less integral ones. Honestly, I cannot understand why Hollywood thinks that to make a great movie, the film must last over two and a half hours. I left the theater twice to use the bathroom - both times were welcome vacations from the slow moving plot. Add to that the fact that I really didn't miss anything during those two breaks, and you might begin to understand what I am talking about. There is a lot of inconsistent development here. Damon's son goes from being a 8-10 year old boy who wets his pants on Santa's lap to being a skull and bones member and a CIA agent. What are his qualifications? What is his life about? We never find out. We are told to assume that he is qualified to work for the CIA and we are told to assume that he is 'spy' material. I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, and it really didn't. Was this movie anti-American? Not really. It reviews with some historical fact, the foundation upon which the CIA was formed. This is not a perfect historical record, nor was it wholly inaccurate. Intelligence organizations like the CIA require steep learning curves and lots of mistakes. There WAS the standard Hollywood slant - in the quest for good, the US did a lot of bad. But it wasn't distracting or overt - as a point of fact, Deniro went on record to say that he wasn't making a statement, but trying to tell a story and I believe him. Unfortunately, all Deniro did was make a Scorcese movie that Scorcese wouldn't make. I find it a little sad that Deniro used Scorcese techniques but without the creativity or originality that Scorcese possesses. Not a bad movie, but not a great movie, this is just a decent movie. Sadly, the Oscar buzz was nonsense. However, there is no doubt that the Oscars will produce massive praise on a movie that swung and missed on a lot of levels. This movie was far too long and, for a movie about the spy world, a touch on the boring side. This movie is better suited to a rental or a second run theater - nothing spectacular.