More of a rip-off than a "homage"

Rating: 2/10 (30 April 2007)

First of all, I really like Christian Bale - he generally stars in very good movies. He was great (IMO) in American Psycho, Equilibrium, and Batman Begins. The reviews for The Machinist are way up there, which I suspect increased my expectations. Regardless of the reviews, I would have watched it merely for Bale's decision to be in it. But here all of the actor's talents go to waste, which is a shame as Mr. Bale possibly shortened his life by losing so much weight for the role.

Spoilers and rants ahead -

The plot was unfortunately made incredibly obvious to me early on in the scene where the machine shop head honcho in the office said that no one with the mystery man's name worked there. OK, so the mystery man is a figment of the main character's imagination, no other explanation. Why do I need to watch the rest of the movie again? It was really a stupid move writing the scene that way, a little ambiguity here would have gone a long way.
Outside of the plot itself being the tired, overdone, reveal the lame-and-only twist too early sort, the music was annoyingly Hitchcockian and obtrusive. Telegraphing scenes with buckets of Theremin-laden orchestration worked pretty good back in the day, but there are good reasons no one does it in supposedly well-crafted movies anymore.
And the "gritty, depressing" blue filter thing has got to stop, and I mean now! A touch of blue is perhaps OK now and then, but nothing but shades of sickly blue just whacks you over the head and screams "look how arty we are!" Enough already. Drop the editing machine and back away from the blue filter, I just can't stand it anymore.
This is the kind of movie you get when the writing and direction just aren't up to snuff. What a waste of everyone's time involved with it, including this viewer's. Rating = 2/10.