Like watching a robot for 3 hours

Rating: 1/10 (24 December 2006)

After seeing the commercials for this film, I was eager to go see it. A spy thriller about the origin of the CIA, with DeNiro, Pesci, and the star of the Bourne Identity sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately it turns out to be 3 hours of boredom in which Matt Damon walks around like an expressionless robot for the whole film. Even the sex scenes were devoid of emotion.
The film chronicles a young Ivy League man's rise through the ranks of the Office of Strategic Services, and its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, from his pre-war college fraternity days to the Kennedy/Johnson era. Along the way we meet lots of shady people who can't be trusted and so forth. DeNiro is the seldom seen godfather of both intelligence services. He's in the film for like 5 minutes. Pesci is in it even shorter.
Despite the exciting events Damon's character is involved in, including various hot spots from wartime Europe to revolutionary Cuba, there is no action. None. The film doesn't focus on the history of the CIA, it's really about how a young man loses his soul amongst the dark shadows, yada yada yada. There is a brief scene near the beginning of the film where Damon is yucking it up with his fraternity buddies, and then for the next 2.75 hours he has no expression, no smile, no emotions whatever. Couple that with the lack of action and the slow-moving story and I was more interested in the conversation the jerk in the seat behind me was having on his cellphone than I was in watching the movie. Even the supposed twists are uninteresting, "who cares" moments. There are many opportunities to see some cool spy craft, but they are lost, as is the opportunity to tell us something about the CIA's history, good and bad. Instead we are treated to scenes where the characters whisper to each other, even inside secure offices, so that I actually had to move closer to the speakers to hear what was going on.
"Godfather of the CIA"? Not hardly.