Truly repellent characters

Rating: 6/10 (25 August 2008)

As awesome as the acting is, especially on the part of Daniel Day-Lewis, I came away wondering why I had lost more than two hours of my valuable time watching a film about two souls so cynical and deceitful that they could not possibly add anything to my life or my values as a human being. The last quarter of the movie was also ponderous and turgid. The Oscar given to Day-Lewis was well deserved and the first hour of the film was intense and eminently watchable though the Day-Lewis character was quite repellent from the outset. Once that hour was up the film tragically went one-way downhill, which did not say much for the quality of direction. Photography? Again, quite splendid in the first half, then flopped like the rest of the film. Was Day-Lewis the ultimate incarnation of Satan and a symbol of savage capitalism?