tiresome

Rating: 2/10 (23 November 2014)

This movie is tiresome in the extreme, totally over-hyped, over-rewarded and ridiculous. I first saw it when it first came out and the interminable amount of time it took before the iceberg hove into view was mind-numbing.
So many problems. The opening framing device was totally unnecessary and felt sooooo long, while adding nothing to our understanding, nor even piqueing our interest (wasn't that supposed to be the intention?).
Then the cast of stereotypes! Awful, and all saddled with flat, uninspired dialogue or worse still, retrospective smart-alec bits ("Picasso? He won't amount to much", "Freud? Who is he? Is he one of the passengers?" .....groan).
The fatal casting of Leonardo di Caprio, still in his baby face mode as a well travelled man of the arts (???), while Kate Winslett, mature and a little blowsy (nothing wrong with that) appears almost old enough to be his mother, is a serious misjudgement. Her fiancé (a luckless Billy Zane) lacked only a moustache that he could fiendishly twist in his most unctuous moments. A total pantomime creation (the villain in Avatar was a similar one dimensional character).
I saw the beginning on TV recently and watched again up until Kate is rescued from leaping off the stern. I hoped that I might be able to reassess it. No chance. It got me just as annoyed as the first time, the improbabilities just as ludicrous (would the crew REALLY have allowed Leo and chum to the bow to yell "King of the world"?). The only reason this got two stars was for the technical sequences during the sinking, but as for the fate of the protagonists, by that stage I was past caring. If only they had employed a talented screen writer. Such a waste.