Lazy direction prohibits this from being really good

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2015)

It's alright. I didn't hate it, but it's too mediocre for me to say that it was a good movie. Now I think the story of this guy is incredible and worth telling, but unfortunately I'm judging the film alone, not a story. A film needs to be able to stand by itself. The movie simply failed to inspire much emotion from me. There I was sitting in the theater watching this guy go through absolute hell and I found that I didn't care that much (no disrespect to the real life guy). That, and the direction was lazy and just plain awful. The entire time I felt like Angelina Jolie had a checklist of things she needed to show and she was just checking them off as she went. It made the whole film feel very predictable and cliché. The ending was pretty bad too. No spoilers, but it just kind of stopped. All I thought of was Angelina Jolie checking off the last on her list and saying " alright, that's everything, now how are we going to end this thing? Any ideas? No? Okay, lets just cut to the Americans winning and having a cliché tell the audience what happened to the real life characters after the events of the movie via pictures and text ending." It isn't all terrible though. My biggest fear going into this was that it was going to be a one sided America is awesome movie. Thankfully it wasn't and I give them credit for that. Besides that, I can say it wasn't boring, but certainly not worth going to see in theaters.