Over-wrought.

Rating: 1/10 (8 May 2004)

(major spoilers - plus, if you're a fan of the film, you won't like my review)
I've never understood the fuss made over this movie - every time its been on TV i've watched the first five minutes, and rolled my eyes for various reasons (the first time it was Gabriel Byrne's accent, the other times it was how over-wrought everything was) and put something good on instead.
I've finally given it the light of day tonight, to the end, and my feeling is this: one minute of cleverness at the end does not justify putting us through two hours of over-wrought actors playing at cops and robbers.
The general situation is so very familiar - the crims who get together for one last job that goes wrong, and the way its told is not fresh either: the structure of the framing narrative in the present day and the flashbacks which take us back to a past event we want to learn the truth about, comes from Citizen Kane and Rashomon (ie, on its own does not make this movie original). The constant promise of a final mystery, which is intended to propel us to the end was invented by Orson Welles, and is a device used quite frequently (Citizen Kane, Rashomon, Go, Memento, The Exterminating Angel, and most movies, in fact).
For two hours this is a lot of posing, actors dressed in "slumming-it" costumes straight from the costume designer's wardrobe, cliche dialogue, unbelievable situations, one unsustainable haircut, stubble and a lot of brooding "i'm a criminal" close-ups.
There is a justified reason for all this falseness (aka pretentiousness), given in the final two minutes, which i can't even bring myself to say in case you haven't seen it and are still reading - i've had too many movies ruined for me. Save to say, like The Sixth Sense, this movie is a one-gimmick movie, and it takes watching it for two hours to find out that gimmick (which is the only possible explanation for characters having what i like to call Stephen King names, by which i mean they sound like someone has sat down and thought "What's a really cool name i can make up?" instead of names real people would have. Or possibly "what's the wackiest name i can give a person and have the audience not laugh" - if this was the case, they failed with me. Every time someone said "Verbal Kint," "Kobayashi," or "Kaiser Sosay" i couldn't help giggling) - i spent two hours rolling my eyes and two minutes saying "yes, that's clever, but if people didn't equate twists with quality then i could have enjoyed the entire two hours - but it would not have been this movie, which is nothing without its gimmick. I had the same problem with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - i need more than one gimmick to keep me interested.