"What's in your backpack?"

Rating: 7/10 (22 March 2018)

I had to wonder while watching the movie if there really is such a job as a corporate hired gun to fire employees, sort of a reverse headhunter if you will. There probably is but I never heard of it, and the way Ryan Bingham's (George Clooney) role was positioned in the story, it looked like a lot of companies would take advantage of the the skills he possessed. It's kind of weird though, to think that a company's personnel executive wouldn't have the courage or fortitude to dismiss employees who were either unproductive or unskilled to meet new challenges. Clooney's character was ideal for the job, harboring no illusions of compassion for those he was sent in to dismiss; I'm sure he made a pretty good buck at it.
The main reason I picked this film to watch when I did was because I was about to take a plane flight the next day on a vacation trip. Not that that had anything to do with the substance of the film, but it made the connection a little more personal. I'm retired now, so there were no thoughts about getting fired while I was away. So then I began thinking what it would take to fly ten million miles and for me, that would be about a thousand years. After Ryan Bingham made it, I thought the gesture of giving his married sister and her newlywed husband a trip around the world was pretty generous, but five hundred thousand miles? The circumference of the Earth is twenty five thousand miles, so you could make that trip twenty times, but who would want to? I thought that was a minor hitch in the script.
Anyway, Bingham learns what it's like to partake in the 'having loved and lost' game after years of noncommital relationships. Personally, I didn't get the chemistry between Bingham and Alex (Vera Fermiga); some reviewers thought she was gorgeous but I didn't think she photographed well at all. The encounter when Ryan made it to her home and realized she had a family was a real kick in the privates for a guy who had a one track mind about finally settling down. As for the character portrayed by Anna Kendrick, it was the perfect representation of a young millennial upstart who knows everything about everything until they meet the real world head on. What was awkward about her role in the story was the way she disappeared for a while when Ryan and Alex did the family wedding thing.
In retrospect, I don't get the Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. The Best Actor/Actress noms also didn't make sense to me, even if Clooney and Fermiga were competent in their portrayals. The story didn't seem to offer much in the way of consequence, but I did take away a few tips on packing for a short trip. I'll have to use them the next time I fly.