Painful

Rating: 1/10 (24 December 2001)

I can't believe how many people love this movie - I have never been closer to walking out of a movie before. It was slow at the beginning and I kept waiting for it to get exciting, or at least interesting, but left wishing I could have the last 3 hours of my life back.
Some of the scenery was breathtaking, but it was obvious that most of it was done using a blue screen. The acting, the special effects and the plot were all awful and I often found myself laughing out loud at how truly dreadful it was.
This movie just drags on forever. The entire plot could have been adequately explained in about half the time. My friend who saw the movie with me left for 45 minutes about an hour into the movie. In talking to him afterwards, I realized he hadn't missed anything of importance from being gone that long.
Probably the worst thing about the movie was the ending. It's like the director just arbitrarily took a knife to the reel and said, "Okay, that's a wrap for the first movie." I knew going in that this was only the first part of a trilogy, but surely they could have come up with a better ending than they did. I can't even say it was anti-climactic, because there was nothing exciting leading up to it!
Maybe I expected too much from the movie after seeing all the positive reviews but it fell well short of my expectations in every conceivable way.