Two good actors, one good twist, everything else poor

Rating: 6/10 (6 October 2002)

I'm amazed that everyone raves about this film, I found it most annoying. Fortunately the last 10 minutes make the film worth watching, but still only enough to pull back up from the doldrums into a middling kind of position.
Let's face it, the acting, on the whole, was useless. The only two exceptions would be the two who spend the most time in the office together having their "I'm smarter than you" battle (Verbal and Kujan). And neither of those were in any way challenging roles. I have nothing against Spacey, but that was _not_ demanding enough to be Oscar material.
Plot-wise, it looked like lots of stuff was just thrown into the mix for the sake of it, not for any concrete coherent reason. My girlfriend and I played "guess the next country mentioned", after about 20 minutes, when we realised that the writer was just trying to make the thing sound as big and international as possible. Where were that Arabs? When I thought there'd be Arabs, there were Argentinians. When I thought there'd be Indians, there were Japanese. So I was wrong with my guesses, but I knew the unimaginative, yes unimaginative, writer would try to throw some more random countries into the plot for no good reason at all - and I was right. At least there was a brief mention of Pakistan, which made my girlfriend's guess partially right. (I remember playing "guess the next death method" in the Omen trilogy too, old habits die hard.)
It's a film that's worth seeing exactly twice. Once to get bored to for an hour or so, and then have the fun of the twist at the end. The second time is to see if you were "missing the point" for the first hour of the first viewing, and conclude that you probably weren't, it is actually pretty tedious as you first thought.
If you want twists, then Fight Club is head and shoulders beyond this.