The New Road

The Good Shepherd

Spoilers Ahead

I was able to make it through the Matt Damon CIA epic last night, incredibly. Lori came along for the ride as well, though she played backgammon through most of it. While it was well produced, I didn't think it was a very good movie. Matt Damon's character was so dry, and talked so little, that it was hard to feel anything about him at all. And Anjolie Jolie was both underused and miscast. She is way too smoking a hottie to be treated like Matt does. In the movie he only marries her because he gets her pregnant. Yeah, right.

The movie is very long, but doesn't actually do much. We don't learn much about the characters because they are all wooden. And we don't learn much we didn't already know about the CIA. Most of the time is spent on ambience and entry/exit scenes. Most of which could have been left on the cutting room floor. Plus, all in all, it's not that interesting of a story. Don't believe the hype when they say it's about the birth of the CIA. That's just a couple of lines of dialogue here and there. It's mainly about Matt and his story. His dry, wooden, pointless story.

Old movies are paced slower, yes, I get that. But they also covered more ground. This one was just slow to be slow. Yeah, some people get killed, and that's mildly interesting. But only just slightly. There isn't even any suspense that I can think of.

Then there were the strange elements of the movie. After watching Matt Damon nude mud wrestle in a Skull & Bones initiation rite I asked Lori if she thought the movie was vaguely homo-erotic. With her eyebrows raised she said, "vaguely?" And that was in the beginning of the movie. There was no more nudity, but there was a hell of a lot of implied man-on-man action going on.

Another strange thing was Matt Damon's son who was played out as a simpering whinger by an actor with a face only a mother could love and a mouth like a bass. Every time he came on screen I just felt compelled to hit fast forward.

I did like that it demanded my attention to detail as I was watching it because most of the time the characters are talking in code, or talking about code. But that can only take you so far.

If there was a target audience for this it would be Lori and I. Both political people who have close relations that were in the CIA. We both came away with a 'meh' response.

So sad, it was a great cast and an awesome subject completely spoiled by a bad script and stilted performances.

I also tried to struggle through Will Smth's Happyness movie and found it ceaselessly depressing.