Letterboxd — Your life in film

I wish I could stop sounding like a broken record and not constantly have to harp on about the ridiculous length of modern day blockbusters. Any movie these days that stays at 90 minutes or lower will by default get an extra point from me. Some more complex films may deserve a length of 2 hours max but only a very small number of epic movies deserves a length of between 2-3 hours. And I am talking BEN HUR epic not MEET JOE BLACK.

THE BOURNE LEGACY is a case in point. Shooting a Bourne movie without the titular hero was always a stretch but the first hour just meanders meaninglessly. The film only picks up a gear or three when the Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz characters finally meet up. From that moment on, however, this is a good replacement for the trilogy of films with that other guy, potentially even leaving a possible team-up between the two open.

This could have easily been a 8/10 film if it wasn't for the dull first hour and Rachel Weisz' cliched female scientist.

Watchable but a wasted opportunity.

Is it possible that a surreal horror trip is cliched?

Had this been shot 20-30 years ago I'd be so over it but since then at least half a dozen directors (including Coscarelli) have made a career out of genre bending mind fucks. So much so that not much ended up appearing truly original.

Wim Wenders' homage to Noir movies is one of those Zoetrope studios produced movies that would be unheard of these days: Who else but Coppola would bring in a German arthouse auteur to revisit the most American of movie genres (apart from the Western)?

It is an interesting film with just right amount of inside references but ultimately also something of a failed experiment. Nice to look at but without much substance.

A Woody Allen movie that is nearly two hours long?

I guess that means that it is at least 20 minutes too long.

The entire painful, shallow and predictable Roberto Benigni plot could have been cut without mercy.

The Alec Baldwin storyline, however, is wonderfully poetic and well worth watching the entire film for and the other two strands are also more hit than miss.... though not without faults.

Overall there is more to like than to dislike but it's far from being a great film. It is, however, clearly not the disaster I had feared given some of the other reviews.

Very average and predictable thriller that I mainly watched because Sky showed it the week after I managed to meet Goldie Hawn in Cannes.... where she kindly told me that no, I could *not* take her photo.

I may have even watched this before but it's so generic it's hard to tell.