If your conscience has been seared into a fried clove of crispy black garlic... Have we got a film for you!

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2008)

So you want to go see a movie. You check the IMDb and see this film is getting an 8.9 rating (#16 on the top 250). It stars Daniel Day Lewis, he's a great actor. The TV ads look smart, and what's that "milkshake" line about anyway? Off you go. Three and a half hours later you return home and go on the IMDb and vote it a 10 out of 10. Why? Because you are a secret mind-controlled drone of the company that made this film and you always do what you are told. That is the only plausible explanation I can come up with for the extraordinarily high ratings There Will Be Blood is receiving. That or your moral compass only points south.
This film is nothing more than a magnificently crafted pile of poop and frankly, I find its undeserving numbers highly suspect. There are plenty of examples where most every critic gets it "wrong" on a popular film, so no need to re-trod that ground (watch The Aristocrats if you don't believe me, I dare you). But a quick perusal of the IMDb comments index for this film seems to tell a different story than a movie voted higher than #18 Raiders of the Lost Ark or #36 Apocalypse Now. Searching in chronological order, about half the comments say they hate this film. Another quarter didn't think it was as good as everyone said, and only about a quarter praise the film. With that track record, this film should score somewhere in the 5 to 7 range. We should all hope that the studios have figured out a way to pump up IMDb scores. Otherwise, we live in a world where pointless violence and hypocrisy are celebrated as the ideal.
No doubt, this film has its merits. Daniel Day Lewis gives an award winning performance. I love it when an actor takes chances and I think it works here, many disagree. The film making is top notch, all the acting too. Most everything from cinematography to wardrobe is as good as it gets. Were this film to have a point, it all would have worked together for a powerful addition to the American film atheneum. As it is, it does nothing more than underscore tired stereotypes and leave its audience wondering why so much effort would be put into such depraved proclamations. Perhaps worse, it glorifies the most evil of human intentions.
Can we agree that more is required for a great film then just good film-making? Otherwise, Gigli deserved better treatment. Here, Daniel Day Lewis plays an oil man in the morally corrupt laissez-faire American big business culture (seen it) fighting with a morally corrupt Christian minister (seen it) in a society full of have-nots (seen it) controlled by gilded evil white men (that's new) and everything, eventually, adds up to nothing but gruesome, vivid murders and pointless hatred. Roll credits.
I found the portrayal of the young minister to be particularly vapid. Pastor of "The Church of the Third Revelation"  please. Even the church name is painfully hack. Look, I can handle stock stereotypes, but can anyone in the film industry portray a Christian leader as anything more than a sad, money grubbing miscreant? And how many times are we going to need to see this before it gets tired? Not that any other religion or group could have taken its place. I wonder what the reaction to this film would have been had the Snidely Whiplash minister been portrayed as a Rabbi, and all the Jews in his congregation nothing more than gullible or emotionally weak? Never mind the cartoonish unfairness of it all, don't you think it makes for uninteresting character development? Whatever.
All the "smart" people will go away from this film figuring out that the world is a hopeless dog eat dog jungle. The rest of us will go home and do all the work that holds society together and hope for some other film to take our minds off things like this. 1 out of 10 for a pointless and grotesque story.