Comme ce comme ca (so-so)

Rating: 5/10 (23 October 2006)

This movie is not bad. This movie is not good. The costumes are great, the movie stars beautiful (it was worth $5 for a matinée glimpse of Jackman without his shirt on), the acting superb (I mean..Michael Caine; it doesn't get any better than that).
But the plot is convoluted and hard to follow. It jumps back and forth, with the audience finding themselves trying to place whether this is in the past, the present, or the future. It also assumes the audience will relate to an obsession of the sort detailed in this movie. I didn't.
The movie was interesting, well worth the reduced matinée price of a movie, and the actors rose to their peak levels for a movie of this sort. But ultimately, it seemed to me that a group of suits sat around a table, made a list of some movie star names, and said, "What movie can we create to have all these guys in the same movie and really pack the audience in?" They ended up with a movie created for these performers, rather than a great movie, the cast for which was pulled from a list of excellent actors.
How it would have been better: A better script, tighter, shorter, a bit less convoluted. Photography - there were far too many extreme closeup shots. It would have been better if they had made some of those extreme closeups more full body or upper body shots, so that the audience could see the body language and maybe the other person the actor was communicating with. Not that there weren't great extreme closeups. And not that I mind seeing Hugh Jackman's eyes in closeup. It's just that there were too many such shots.
I expected more from Bale, Jackman, and Caine. Like I said, it was good, not bad. But I would've thought that these three powerweights of Hollywood could have commanded an excellent script and an award winning movie. They didn't hit it with this one.