Tour de Forced

Rating: 4/10 (16 June 2008)

This is a wannabe Hollywood Epic. It's boring and overrated. It centers on bashing Christians and oil tycoons - two for the price of one in Hollywood. The main character played by Daniel Day Lewis is a skeleton: no meat, all bones: and I'm not being literal. We don't get to know him at all. Lewis overacts by making up a totally fake accent, that sounds like he's doing a John Huston imitation. Although the first hour isn't bad. Things build well as we see his rise to power through - basically - hard work and a lot of trickery: the same way bigwigs in Hollywood come to power, although with movies as opposed to oil. But after the main character - Daniel Plainview - starts to run into "family problems": his son going deaf, a transient pretending to be his brother, the film starts to tread in muddy water. And I don't blame Lewis and his overacting; Paul Dano gives the most hammy performance as a "faith healer" that I've ever seen in my life. His performance made Lewis seem subtle. This is an eight foot ballerina, and watching it I felt it landing on me.