Nate's Rating: D :I'm wondering who in Hollywood has so much dirt on Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie that they can force them to do a movie like this. Could it be the director and made-up name contest winner, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck? We may never know.
Slow-moving and overly... um... lame, the movie has the feel of a film school undergraduate's semester project, but without the edgy originality that often comes from the pools of the young & talented. The lighting and cinematography are distractingly bad; in some scenes, Angelina Jolie looks positively ghoulish. And let's face it, how sloppy do you have to be to make Angelina Jolie look ugly?
The home-video quality lighting isn't helped much by the plot, which over-romanticized and inconsistent to a level which is only possible in the minds of pre-teen girls. There are so many things that happen that don't make any sense that you wonder if the director, writer, and editor ever even talked to each other. Then you realize that the director was one of the writers and you really get confused.
Still, in the middle of it all, Depp and Jolie do their best to make lemons out of a train wreck. Jolie has the harder job because there is really no character there at all. No personality, a past that wouldn't even fill out an entry in the obituaries, and without a single interesting or insightful line in the entire 105 minute run-time. She's basically the highest paid talking prop in Hollywood. Depp's character is somewhat relatable, thankfully, and he and Jolie together save this from the forbidden "F" rating.
But not by much. It's a very solid "D".
