A Rather Excruciating Two And A Half Hours

Rating: 2/10 (22 November 2008)

I think the last significant movie I saw that featured Daniel Day-Lewis in a significant role was "Gangs of New York." I was reminded of that movie somewhat. My reaction to "Gangs" was that it was dreadfully dull, although it did have a smattering of action here and there and at least I could see by the end that there was a point to the whole thing. Its high rating notwithstanding, I have to pin "There Will Be Blood" with the same dreadfully dull tag. The difference between this and "Gangs" is that there was precious little action to be found here, long stretches of nothingness (about ten minutes passes by at the start of the movie with no dialogue at all) and in the end I really couldn't see what the point of this was. Some parts of this movie are well done. The portrayal of the Old West was totally believable, the look at early oil drilling was interesting, the performances from Day-Lewis as silver miner turned oilman Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as the charismatic preacher Eli Sunday were good and the final confrontation between Plainview and his "son" (Russell Harvard) was very emotional. Overall, though, to me the story didn't seem to flow all that well. It just completely failed to capture my attention, and trying to keep focused on a movie that is just plain uninteresting for two and a half hours is excruciating. For whatever reason I also found the musical score by Jonny Greenwood to be at times inappropriate in that it often just didn't seem to fit the mood of what I was seeing on the screen. Clearly I'm in the minority on this, but I just didn't find this to be a good movie at all, and I frankly can't go any higher than a 2/10 for it.