There Will Be Ripoffs, Stale Old Clichés, Repetition , Boredom and an Overlong Running-Time

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2008)

First of all it must be said that Saw II called, and it wants it's catchphrase back. Saw II made famous the catchphrase "Oh yes, there will be blood!" as stated by the excellent actor Tobin Bell playing the amazing character Jigsaw in that movie. The title "There Will Be Blood" is in my opinion quite obviously a ripoff of Saw II's catchphrase after Saw II popularized it. But the ripoffs don't end there. Not by a longshot.
Daniel Day Lewis gives a magnificent performance as Daniel Plainview, an evil & insane oil tycoon from the early 1900's. The problem is, he also gave the *exact same* magnificent performance in the old Martin Scorscese movie, "Gangs of New York" when he played Bill the Butcher. The *only* difference between Lewis' performance in these two movies is that he changed his accent, and his hairstyle is slightly different. These are minor differences. Other than that, the two performances and characters are completely identical. Daniel Day Lewis is just re-hashing here the same thing he's *already done* just as well in that older movie. His character even bludgeons another main character to death, off-screen, in both movies, in an almost identical way. Having said that, he gives great performances in both movies so he's interesting to watch due to his undeniable acting mastery. But there is nothing *original* about his performance in There Will Be Blood (TWBB). And great acting alone can't save a movie that has nothing else going for it.
TWBB is 2 hours and 37 minutes long, but it doesn't need to be. Most of the movie spends gratuitous amounts of screen-time showing repetitive shots over and over again. Showing lots of CGI fire and black smoke for 10 minutes in a row, on more than one occasion. Shots which drag on and on needlessly for several minutes long-after the audience has already gotten the point of the scene. The content of TWBB could *easily* fit into 1 hour and 10 minutes or less.
For some very bizarre reason, TWBB *thinks* it's a horror movie. It is constantly blaring cheesy "scary horror movie music" over every scene. Horror music that in my opinion rips off the theme from the Hitchcock movie "Psycho" as well as a host of other horror movies over the last 50 years. This is only speculation, but my guess is that perhaps they started with the title of the movie first, and since it was ripped off from a horror movie, decided that they might as well go right ahead and make TWBB *into* a horror movie. Then made the cheesy horror movie music score before doing anything else. But somewhere down the line some smart person realized that they weren't supposed to be making a horror movie and they stopped trying to, yet decided to save some money by using the cheesy horror movie score anyways.
One of the main characters in this movie is a fraudster "faith healer" Priest who doesn't believe what he preaches. This is a stale old cliché that has literally been done *thousands* of times in movies and television ever since they first existed. The only difference in TWBB's take on this is that there is no balanced perspective. TWBB *only* presents an anti-God, atheist point of view. Whereas other productions that have explored the fraudster faith healer theme have done it in a classy way that shows that while faith healers are indeed bad, not all Priests are bad, and bashing God or religion is not cool. For an example of a balanced and much better-done take on the same thing, try watching the television episode "The Faith Healer" from Little House on the Prairie which was produced in 1979.
No doubt one of the main reasons TWBB gets so much undeserved acclaim is because it bashes Christianity and has the Priest in the movie saying "God is a superstition". In Hollywood, it is very fashionable to bash Christianity and religion in general. Doing so is almost a guaranteed way to garner critical acclaim. However, for those who are not atheists, this is derogatory and an unethical thing to be doing in movies. Just because not everyone is religious - which is fine - it isn't an excuse to trample on the beliefs of those who are. Everyone is *supposed to* be respected, but this movie doesn't respect anyone other than the evil psychopath oil tycoon character who also happens to be an atheist.
The plot of the movie is virtually non-existent. The entirety of the plot boils down to Daniel swindling some communities out of their land so he can dig oil wells and/or build pipelines in it, and murdering some people along the way. This too, is a stale old cliché that has been done - and done-better - thousands of times before.
The dialogue is banal. In one case ripping off 70's Blaxploitation flicks. TWBB has a line in it, "I'm your brother from another mother." In another case it rips off the Kelis song "Milkshake" with the line ""I drink your milkshake. I drink it up." It sounds like I'm making that up, but I'm not --- both of those lines are in the movie, verbatim. It is kind of funny that they lift lines from Black culture, yet there are only White people in this movie. Maybe it's their small way of not being accused of being a racist movie? In any case, the banal dialogue doesn't work on any level. Another example of verbatim banal dialogue from this movie: "You are a stupid man."
TWBB is a waste of almost 3 hours. You'd do much better to watch the originator of it's title instead, Saw II. At least Saw II *knows* it's a horror movie and has some interesting dialogue and plot in it. Much moreso than TWBB does.