Not Quite a Masterpiece, But Not WORST MOVIE EVER!!!!

Rating: 7/10 (2 December 2000)

Just saw this tonight and I'm still puzzled as to how I feel about the film. Having skimmed through some of the comments it appears people are either embracing it as a masterpiece or reviling it as a boring piece of garbage. I won't go so far as to suggest this film is a masterpiece, but it certainly skews closer to that end of the spectrum than the other.
Things I Liked:
1) Bruce Willis. Lots of people said he was really really boring, which is their way of saying, "He wasn't being John McClane, he wasn't the Bruce Willis I am used to. I don't get it." Understated acting does not necessarily mean boring. He was playing a sad, confused Everyman (at least emotionally), it would be ludicrous for him to spout lame one-liners and start crawling into ventilation ducts. I thought he did a great job.
2) Samuel L. Jackson. The Willis-Jackson chemistry is great here, better than their DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE team-up, and Jackson by himself is fantastic as he almost always is. He had the more flamboyant and unusual of the two lead roles, so perhaps he had the advantage over Willis, but he manages to keep his character from flying up into the camposphere by delivering fantastical dialogue seriously.
3) The comic book as modern mythology idea was interesting although underdeveloped, like the movie itself really. I wish they had trimmed a good fifteen or so minutes of longing stares and slow motion shots of people standing around so they could have afforded more screen time to developing the movie's central premise, that is, that the power and truth of Mythic Reality can and does exist in the modern world, filtered and diluted though it might be.
Things I Didn't Like:
1) Okay, I hate to sound like a Bruckheimer-loving yokel, but this movie really did drag. I'm not asking for even one gratuituous car chase, but please, Night, zip it up a little. I felt every one of this movie's one hundred and fifteen minutes.
2) Like THE SIXTH SENSE, this is a film more or less without plot. The plot, such as it is, is the growth and self-realization of a character. That's fine and dandy, but I kept waiting for Clark Kent to finally move to Metropolis, so to speak. Willis spends the whole movie stuck in Smallville here, and when it finally does look as if he's about to maybe tear open his shirt to reveal the big red S (metaphorically speaking of course), they hit us with the ending...
3)....which, to put it the least, I did not like. It was an interesting twist, I'll grant the filmmakers that. I loved Jackson's final rambling speech, it was great, sad and horrifying all at once. But then they go and ruin it by stapling a very clumsy, very awkward text card "Epilogue" onto the final frames. Ugh. First of all, it's not like this is true story (I expected another title to read "(so-and-so) is still at large. If you have any information as to the whereabouts of this person, please notify the theater manager.") so that makes no sense. Secondly, the movie was so drawn-out and elongated (which at times worked and at other times did not) that to truncate the ending like that, to resolve the story in a rush and not even visually but with text, felt like a huge cheat.
Overall I give this movie a 7. Worth seeing at least once.