Firmly split on this one, which seems about right given that Nolan is simultaneously over-praised and undervalued (though I consider myself a partisan of his). But there really is no getting past the gulf between its staggering, brilliant conceit—which attempts to do no less than to demonstrate, with increasing temporal and spatial immediacy, the parallel planes upon which a war is fought; to enfold the immediate ground-level experience of those events within a larger historical understanding of one of the…

There's not much that ultimately separates charmingly goofy and bafflingly inept, but I suppose I'm generally skeptical of projects where the latter can be passed off as the former simply because the project is so self-consciously light-hearted (call it "reversible appeal"). The dialogue, for one, is so consistently, unflappably dreadful that it's actually kind of amazing. And it's rather impressive how many lines there are about Dane Dehaan's handsome, lady-killer agent being so irresistible (from Cara Delevingne, no less), especially…

This was going to be two stars, and then that finale happened, which is a shame since the film is actually rather interesting—if also fundamentally conflicted and confused—from the moment it relocates to Okinawa. (Everything before that is so dull that it's barely worth mentioning, except to note that Gibson tries to do Full Metal Jacket, but with Vince Vaughn in the R. Lee Ermey role, and a strange amount of the material played for laughs.) The disjunction between having…