Too slow, unrewarding, fragmented, pretentious, chaotic and pointless

Rating: 1/10 (20 June 2007)

This film is extremely inefficient, pointless, emotionless and suspenseless (save a few moments in the last hour). After two hours of watching I still found myself unrewarded for my patience. I didn't care anymore, it was going nowhere slow. A great movie is supposed to fascinate you from beginning to end, not to let you wait 2 hours for that to happen.
There are countless characters and scenes which are completely unnecessary and get in the way of what could otherwise have been an interesting film. The way the plot swings back and forth to several periods (WW II era, fifties, sixties) is also very chaotic, under the pretense of being ingenious which only makes it worse.
Because there's so much bits and pieces floating around it never can get deep. This film is too eager to move on to each next fragment of a story that has no clear direction. A poorly structured scenario is to blame in which a lot less important or even meaningless fragments could have been left out.
No great cast could have saved this disaster. Imagine this film not being made by de Niro and not be played by the allstar cast it had. What value would it have? 1 out of 10 to compensate for the blind admiration of Great Names, this film is clearly overrated. I advise to go read the next chapter of your book instead of watching this yawn.