| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
This comedy has a too complicated plot to be really funny because it is successfully evading actually being about anything much. The men are feckless; the women looking for real men. This leads to much humor about the loneliness that leads to lonely hearts’ dating and the meaningless sex that usually follows.
George CLOONEY is unconvincing as a sex obsessed man who would need the services of a dating Website and the film itself implicitly comments on his good looks when the ever excellent Frances McDORMAND sees – with open-eyed delight - that a good-looking man wants to sleep with her. Brad PITT also fails the believability test as the complete fool the actor clearly is not – a strange part for him to accept and to play. Tilda SWINTON is simply wasted in a role that requires very little effort from someone as talented as she is. A film with a big cast but little ambition.
The successful aspects of this movie are the 007 parody allied with the President’s Analyst brand of espionage paranoia: The characters do not know what is going on and neither do we. This suggests that the real mystery in this story is not why a CIA agent would become a drunk, but why such a story should be deemed worthy of being filmed. This film is intermittently-hilarious but unevenly acted by performers who are often simply miscast. The movie’s saving grace is its blistering critique of the inadequacy and incompetence of state bureaucracies, since they are shown as being as wise as we are as to what this film is really all about. This could have been an effective satire on the ability of such agencies to protect us from determined terrorist attacks but, sadly, it ain’t.
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