It's like they took A Beautiful Mind, scribbled out the title on the DVD, and wrote The Machinist.

Rating: 1/10 (13 September 2008)

Before I saw The Machinist, if you asked me what the most predictable/pointless movie I have ever seen was, I'd most likely say A Beautiful Mind. Now that I have seen The Machinist, it easily takes that #1 most predictable, cliché, pointless rank because it ISno one can argue this, it ISA Beautiful Mind with a little less cheese, a little better lighting. To top it off, A Beautiful Mind was cliché and predictable when it came out, but The Machinist came out AFTER it.
According to cheap Hollywood, the detention of "physiological thriller" is as follows: a movie with a main character who has some sort of mental disability (but is smart), and then "weird" things happen (which can be copy/pasted from episodes of The Twilight Zone if you have no idea how to be original) in his daily life, only to find out that everything weird was in his mind. For "daring" directors, this could include the use of a murder that the character thinks his imaginary friend committed, but it was really him. If you still cannot think of a plot for yourself, just take the script from movies like A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Sev7n, etc., and copy it wholesale and change the character's names. Also, as a side note, a physiological thriller cannot be based on anything but multiple personalities and/or pink elephantsanything more original than that means your film will be destroyed by the critics and it will be too intelligent for the audience to understand.
The paragraph above also doubles as the plot for The Machinist. Normal life, weird (cliché) stuff happens, main character finds out it's all in his head, end of movie. Can people just get over it already? If you didn't find The Machinist predictable and understand every "twist" before they were revealed, walking down the street to get a cup of coffee must be insanely surprising to you.
On a technical level, the film was flawless. Great atmosphere and directing. Pretty good acting from Christian Bale, and far superior to the acting in the films this movie rips-off. That's the only thing I can complement.
The movie itself moves along at the slowest pace humanly possible. Boring daily life has never seen so much screen time. To call The Machinist boring is an understatement. I personally fell asleep around the middle of it and when I woke up I simply could not finish it until the next day. Nothing was happening, and in the end, nothing happens. There was not a single thrilling moment in the movie, no matter how much the raised volume of the annoying classical score wants to suggest.
Some people are trying to say the film is great because of the moral value the ending suggests, but, really, it is nothing special or life changing. I can see a lot of people not even noticing that it tries to be moral with a positive ending.
The Machinist in the end is a waste of time. I wanted so badly to like this movie, and I did for the first hour or soup until it turned to the most cliché movie I have ever personally seen. The movie would have benefited so much if it kept the same beginning, same ending, but just got rid of the clichéd "mystery" that was no more mysterious than an episode of Scooby Doo. The Machinist is a copy of a copy. Maybe I'm the only one out there who is sick of movies like this, but, I'm sorry to say, this was pathetic.
1/10