(500) Days of Summer (USA, 2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Chloe Moretz, Clark Gregg

As a film enthusiast you're always on the lookout for innovation in films - not specifically for films which move the goalposts and redefine our notions of cinema, but for those which take something well-worn and familiar and challenge it for a new audience. With this in mind, there is nothing that can get one's gander up more than a film which claims or thinks that it is being inventive, when in fact the merest glance beneath its surface shows that it is nothing of the sort.(500) Days of Summer comes at you with claims of being a genuine postmodern love story, an Annie Hall for the Twitter generation, or a rom-com for people who genuinely hate rom-coms. While it may not have the putridly glossy veneer of Sex and the City, the film ultimately shoots itself in the foot by being too kooky for its own good, and too structurally self-conscious to feel genuine. While there are still ideas and moments which sparkle, for the most part it feels disappointingly hollow.There's no denying that the makers of (500) Days of Summer had their hearts in the right place when setting out. In an age where cinema is increasingly and ever more cynically geared to the interests of teenage boys, romantic comedies or dramas with believable female protagonists are harder and harder to come by. The majority of contemporary romantic comedies are either predictable rehashes of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s, or vacuous vessels for product placement, offering women supposed material satisfaction in place of some more permanent form of happiness or self-esteem.Marc Webb's film is at its strongest when it attempts to puncture that self-contained, pre-packaged form of contentment. Joseph Gordon-Levitt writes greetings cards for a living, and struggles to remain optimistic or positive about the prospect of love in generalr. In one of the film's best scenes, he stands up in the middle of a meeting and lets rip about how hollow and meaningless love and happiness have become. Our culture has become so orientated around 'events', seeing emotion as something to be conveyed through commerce, that we are losing our ability to genuinely feel affection or understand each other.Somewhere within (500) Days of Summer, there is an edgier, more adventurous film which wants to use this premise to completely deconstruct the modern notion of love and romance. There is the potential within this material for something as scabrous and poisonous as Heathers, a ferociously funny film which ripped into the John Hughes view of high school by making you both squirm and howl with laughter. But try as he might, Webb can't seem to bring this desire to the surface for more than a few moments at a time. For all its claims of being left-field, indie-spirited and unconventional, (500) Days of Summer is structurally all too similar to the films whose clichés it claims to subvert.The single biggest problem with the film is that its structure of shuffled timeframes doesn't work. The film occupies the same kind of ground as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, trying to depict or capture the seemingly random way in which memory works within the context of a failed romantic relationship. But where Michel Gondry used the shuffled structure with great intelligence, confounding our expectations and getting us to question our own memories, Marc Webb treats it as a gimmick, as little more than a device to distract from the conventional elements of the story.This lack of confidence in the use of non-linear narrative is shown by the presence of a narrator. Having a narrator in any kind of story gives a feeling of certainty to the direction and outcome of the plot. This is even true of film noir, where an unreliable narrator makes us certain that we should not trust anyone. When you have a film which sells itself on being free-spirited and unpredictable, you don't want any creative element which would suggest otherwise. The narration here is as pointless as the narration in The Big Lebowski; it cheapens the experience by introducing choreography into an atmosphere of spontaneity.In terms of the central relationship, there isn't a great deal about either Tom or Summer which hasn't been covered in some depth before. Dynamically they're very similar to the main characters in Annie Hall: Joseph Gordon-Levitt may not be as neurotic or self-hating as Woody Allen, but Zooey Deschanel is frequently as off-the-wall (and as annoying) as Diane Keaton. The idea of the relationship being important despite the fact that boy and girl do not end up together has been handled more conclusively in several other films. I don't recall either Annie Hall or Gregory's Girl having such a clunker of a final scene.The familiar elements of (500) Days of Summer keep coming to the fore as the film moves forward (and backward). The conversations surrounding musical taste are essentially the same as the arguments in Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, but with an indie gloss on top (in other words, substitute any other band for 'The Smiths' and you're home free). Summer may claim that romance is dead like it's a novel concept, but she is essentially playing the Billy Crystal role in When Harry Met Sally..., being the sceptical side of a relationship which treads on the edge of friendship. There's nothing wrong with making a love story with familiar scenes and plot points, but it helps if the film is happy with admitting this, rather than constantly avoiding the issue so that it can continue claiming to be original.One of the problems with the indie genre is that it attempts to compensate for the ordinary, often dull nature of its stories with unbridled levels of kookiness. While (500) Days of Summer isn't exactly off the radar, it contains any number of moments which will send the less tolerant among us running for cover. Some of the sillier romantic scenes are funny, like Summer's quip about her high school nickname, or the couple frolicking around in Ikea and remarking that "there's a Japanese family in our bathroom". But Deschanel's impromptu singing and the drunken karaoke scenes which follow are a clear sign of the plot running out of steam. And that's not to mention the completely misjudged musical number, which is closer to High School Musical than Singing in the Rain.The final, and most surprising, problem is the film's lack of interest in the motivations of its female character. While Tom gets his fair share of backstory about failed relationships, and those of his male workmates for comparison, we get no real indication of what has made Summer who she is, and why she behaves towards men in the way she does. One could argue that this is symptomatic of the genre as a whole, with the film becoming less of a rom-com than a bromance that happens to have girls in. But that does not excuse the lack of intrigue surrounding Summer, for which Zooey Deschanel must take some of the blame. Regardless of how underwritten she is, you cannot make us care about someone by staring doe-eyed into middle distance for two hours.The other performances in the film are a little more promising. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has proved his action chops in Brick and Inception, and he does the best he can with a role which requires him to be constantly either in a mood or blank-faced wonder. A pre-Kick-Ass Chloe Moretz is thoroughly impressive as Tom's worldly-wise younger sister, with both actor and character having wisdom beyond their years without looking like they are trying to play younger than themselves. And Clark Gregg is convincing as Tom's boss, coming across as creepy and unsettling without going over-the-top.(500) Days of Summer is a disappointing and deeply overrated addition to the rom-com genre. When stripped of all its hype and kookiness, it is essentially Annie Hall with shuffled timeframes, half the brains and less than half the conviction. Had Marc Webb the guts to risk being unpopular, and deconstruct the notion of modern love head on, it might have been more memorable, distinctive and enjoyable. One hopes that he will do a better job when dealing with Peter Parker.

Rating:
Verdict: Overrated and overly kooky

We Need To Talk About Kevin (UK/ USA, 2011)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell

Fate has a funny way of producing amazing success out of apparent failure. For the best part of two years, director Lynne Ramsay struggled to bring The Lovely Bones to the silver screen. She relinquished the project in 2004 and contemplated giving up filmmaking, while The Lovely Bones eventually emerged in a heavily flawed version helmed by Peter Jackson. But without being unfair to either director, this failure was almost certainly a good thing. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to talk about Kevin.We Need To Talk About Kevin is Ramsay's first film in nearly nine years, and is without any conceivable doubt the best film of the year. It's an astonishing, bold and haunting work which is both evocative and emotionally draining, combining a fragmented, nightmarish narrative with expressionistic visuals to create an intoxicating experience. Its unique and frightening vision of the world will chill you to the bone and remain with you for a very, very long time.Regardless of its other merits (and there are many), the film is a flawless adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel. Ramsay doesn't fall into the trap of many bestseller adaptations, which simply arrange the pages in a literalistic order, shoot what they contain and hope that the performances will somehow hold it together. Instead she takes the book's fragmented confessional structure and transforms it, allowing the story to move between events fifteen years apart without any feeling of directorial imposition or incoherence.We Need To Talk About Kevin finds Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton at her terrifying best) looking back over her relationship with her first-born son, struggling to understand how and why he ended up massacring his classmates with a bow and arrow. Their story is told expressionistically, with imagery, colours and sounds being employed to connect Eva's memories. We are never spoon-fed any easy answers about where blame or cause may lie, or whether Eva's intense guilt is justified. The experience is draining in the best possible sense: we follow every glance and sound intensely, feverishly looking for some kind of meaning in all the horror we encounter.Purely on a narrative level, We Need to Talk About Kevin is an extraordinary representation of how memory works. It is on a par with Memento in its refusal to allow plot to get in the way of story, or mechanics to override emotions. The internal logic of Kevin is present in its powerful colour palette: the film begins with Eva being drenched in tomatoes at La Tomatina in Spain, which foreshadows the gruesome massacre that Kevin will wreak upon his innocent and unsuspecting classmates. But like Christopher Nolan's later works, like Inception and The Prestige, feeling lost or deeply confused is as thrilling as having it all worked out.Outside of Nolan's mental and narrative acrobatics, the film to which Kevin sits closest is Inland Empire, David Lynch's most recent and perhaps most esoteric work. Both films feature female protagonists who are dragged deeper and deeper into a dark world from which there is seemingly no escape, and in which the power of their imaginations are as great an enemy as whatever physical evil may be waiting for them. Eva's guilt, shame, negligence and suppressed despair are a powerful cocktail which produce moments of both earth-shattering horror and painful beauty.The other comparison between Ramsay and Lynch is in the disorientating use of sound. The soundtrack to Kevin is by Johnny Greenwood, who previously scored There Will Be Blood, and here he continues his fascination with the intrusive quality of music. Where There Will Be Blood featured burbling eruptions and groaning ironwork (akin to Alan Splet's work on Eraserhead), Kevin is populated with background noises being amplified in a way which is fantastically unsettling.The film's exploration of memory and trauma is not confined to the evocative nature of colour and composition. Ramsay's sound design is magnificent, turning ordinary background noise into a source of threat and menace. Kevin's constant screaming as a young child leaves Eva and us with a heightened sense of the world around us. We hear a lawnmower, or a sanding tool, or even rain falling, as if there were a woodpecker hammering away in each ear.In one memorable moment, Eva parks Kevin's pram by a pneumatic drill in the road, going to desperate lengths to drown out her child's complaining. We are on constant alert throughout the film, and every sound, especially from Kevin, feels like a vicious attack. But as well as being aware of such attacks, Eva appears to have grown numb because of them: it's difficult to say whether she simply no longer cares about what Kevin does, or whether she is too tired to fight. Perhaps she invites in the noise of the world around her to help her forget the problem she has borne.The film is an intelligent, nuanced and multi-layered approach to the nature of evil, asking many questions to which there are no satisfying answers. It's redundant to single any one out as the 'issue' of the film, because they are all interconnected and there is no sugary pay-off that you would find in more Oscar-baiting work. The film is almost structured as a thriller, in which we are charged with gathering all the evidence and offering our verdict as to what happened and why. But the evidence is so conflicted, ambiguous and speculative that it will take many viewings and much discussion to settle on even a workable version of events and motives.One of the questions which Kevin raises is whether evil is something which is innate, or whether it is a product of one's upbringing. Eva is far from a natural mother, seemingly incapable of dealing with Kevin and harbouring bitterness at him for ruining her life and career. But both of the actors who play Kevin (Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller) have a disturbing charisma and intelligence: they are smarter than Eva and Franklin, seeing through their every word and deed, and having no time for emotions unless they serve their interests.From this arises the question of who is to blame for everything. Is Kevin guilty because he is inherently evil, a sociopath who exists to provide entertainment for the empty-headed morons that are called his equals? Is it Eva, for not standing up to him? Is it Franklin for ignoring Eva's warnings, laughing off her perhaps irrational ravings with comments like "that's just what boys do"? Or perhaps it is a wider social problem: Kevin speaks about the voyeuristic nature of modern society, in which people on TV are filmed watching TV, and in which what is left of entertainment comes from acts of shocking, shattering horror like those that he will perpetrate.Finally, there is the role of emotions to consider. It is possible to accept, up to a point, that Eva never really loved Kevin: that she held him responsible for ruining her chances of happiness, and soon got tired of playing mother, knowing full well that there was no point. But equally there is evidence of Kevin's emotional side underneath his dark veneer. We might accept that he is a sociopath, someone who cannot process human emotion and revels in causing pain to others. But in the final scene in the prison, he is openly afraid, a sign that he is still a child who craves affection. This is a significant if pyrrhic victory for Eva in a story of shame and sorrow, and the ending with her walking into piercing white light would seem to leave things on a balance between optimism and stark pathos.We Need To Talk About Kevin is the film of the year and Lynne Ramsay's best work to date. It is a shocking, haunting, deeply unnerving masterpiece with a bold artistic vision, every bit as striking and earth-shattering as the best works of David Lynch. If we get another film as good as this in the decade, let alone the year, all the dross which passes in between can easily be forgiven. It is a staggering achievement on all fronts, and nothing short of essential viewing.

Rating:
Verdict: Film of the year

The Adjustment Bureau (USA, 2011)
Directed by George Nolfi
Starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery

When Ridley Scott showed him the rough cut of Blade Runner just months before he died, Philip K. Dick is said to have remarked: "it is as though you looked inside my head." But not all adaptations of Dick's work have been quite so ecstatically received. For all the ones that have worked (Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly), there have been at least as many that ditched the more thoughtful aspects of Dick's work in favour of chasing and explosions. Adding to Paycheck and Next, we now have The Adjustment Bureau, which could be the biggest let-down of the year.It's not as though The Adjustment Bureau doesn't have talent behind it. Emily Blunt has demonstrated her dramatic chops in My Summer of Love and The Young Victoria, while Matt Damon is fast becoming one of the most reliable screen actors of our time. George Nolfi, who wrote and directed the film, worked as a co-writer on The Bourne Ultimatum, which remains Paul Greengrass' best work. And it is shot by John Toll, who won back-to-back Oscars for his work on Legends of the Fall and Braveheart.With these credentials it would be tempting to brand The Adjustment Bureau as 'Bourne-lite' - or maybe 'Inception-lite' due to its science fiction trappings. But to do this would be a great disservice to both films, since The Adjustment Bureau has neither the intellectual rigour nor the heart-stopping, emotional action of these films. In fact, it is everything that those films weren't: flimsily constructed, loosely written, glossy-looking for its own sake and with underdeveloped ideas.What made the later Bourne films so fantastic was the ability of Paul Greengrass to marry the aggressive, hand-held action sequences to believable character drama. The Bourne Ultimatum balanced this perfectly, with none of Jason Bourne's personal quandaries getting lost in or watered down by the spectacular action. Looking at Nolfi's film from a writing point of view, you'd swear that he had written the chase scenes and let Greengrass do the rest. He does not have the skill to marry action and ideas together, creating a film which is at best silly and at worst completely shallow.The Adjustment Bureau is essentially a perfectly decent, if unremarkable, romantic comedy surrounded by increasingly preposterous elements of science fiction. The central relationship between David and Elise does have a genuine spark about it: the romantic dialogue in Nolfi's screenplay is too witty to have been written by a committee, and both characters feel like rounded human beings with believable jobs and lifestyles. We enjoy the company of Damon and Blunt because their emotional responses seem believable, increasingly a rarity in Hollywood rom-coms.Normally, this kind of frothy concoction would do absolutely fine. But the science fiction elements, which provide the backdrop and keep breaking into the plot, cause the more contrived moments in the relationship to become magnified. Having David give up on Elise, only to have him realise he loves her and run across a city to find her, would work perfectly well on its own. But when you have David running across the city through secret doors, which he can only pass through while wearing a trilby, it very quickly becomes ludicrous, like a bad mash-up of The Graduate and Tron.The Adjustment Bureau does attempt to raise a number of interesting questions about fate, chance and free will, subjects which are staples not only of science fiction but of Dick's work in particular. At the centre of the film is a discussion about whether human beings are free to choose how they live their lives, or whether we are simply actors reading lines off a script which has already been written (and re-written). The film strikes an interesting balance between the two, saying that while humanity's behaviour is constantly 'adjusted', it is not possible for the Bureau to be everywhere at once or stop every bad thing from happening. They even go so far as to admit that certain things are entirely down to chance, although it isn't specified where exactly the lines are drawn.The film does a pretty good job of demonstrating the cost of free will - or, from the Bureau's point of view, the advantages of intervention. Terence Stamp's character delivers a speech similar to Al Pacino's in The Devil's Advocate, about how Mankind has taken itself to the brink whenever 'the Chairman' has taken a hands-off approach (for instance, the Dark Ages and the Cold War). The film retunes Dick's paranoia surrounding big corporations (and Hollywood) to a more abstract moral dilemma, in which the Chairman is God and his hatted assistants are interceding angels, keeping Humanity on the straight and narrow at the cost of there being no genuine free will.The Adjustment Bureau attempts to retune this concept further to look at the course of true love. The central relationship, between a congressman and a ballerina, follows the trajectory of most American rom-coms: all sorts of obstacles are created to push them apart, but we always know that they will somehow end up together. The Adjustment Bureau doesn't deviate from this mould, but what it does do is offer a twist on why such obstacles occur. Rather than being the result of personal attitudes or quirkiness, the obstacles faced by Damon and Blunt are created by the powers-that-be, whether God or - to go all Pirandello for a second - the writers themselves.Unfortunately, there are two gigantic problems with the manner in which The Adjustment Bureau tackles these ideas. The first is that it is very literal-minded, and fails to bring out the moral dilemmas without resorting to blatant plot exposition. Terrence Stamp's character is effectively Basil Exposition in a sharp suit, as though Nolfi thought Stamp was too old to be running around Chicago, telling him to stay in the warehouse and talk to his heart's content.Alfred Hitchcock once said that exposition is a pill which must be sugar-coated if the audience is to remain in suspense. If North by Northwest is the epitome of sugar-coating, then The Adjustment Bureau is like a series of big and bitter pills. Whereas Inception introduced the mechanics of the dream-state incrementally, this handles its mechanics like someone repeatedly dropping a sledgehammer. It never has the confidence or foresight to outline exactly how much of what we see is adjusted, and the conversations about the plans are shoved down the audience's throats.The second big problem with the films is that it dodges all the big moral questions that follow from its intriguing set-up. Not only does it gloss over where the battle lines are drawn, but its payoff feels far too easy. The lengthy chase sequences in the final act are an excuse to canter through the character development when it really matters, and the rooftop scene finds the script skimming over the philosophical implications of the plan 'being changed'. In its naked pursuit of a happy, feel-good ending, The Adjustment Bureau produces the exact opposite emotional response.The visuals of The Adjustment Bureau are also guilty of being shallow. John Toll may be a great cinematographer, but under Nolfi's instructions everything is far too glossy: the overabundance of shiny blues and metallic greys make everything look like a shaving advert, or one of George Clooney's coffee commercials. The chase sequences are a blatant excuse to get the ol' green screen out, making the action seem even less physical or believable. At every possible turn there is a pursuit of style over content, and speed over intelligence.The Adjustment Bureau is a deeply disappointing film which lacks the depth, nuance or subtlety of the best Philip K. Dick adaptations. In Nolfi's hands what could be a potentially interesting sci-fi romance becomes something flimsy, frothy and ultimately too ridiculous. I would be lying if I said I didn't laugh, either mockingly at the film or out of charm at the central couple. But laughter isn't enough to do justice, either to Dick's material or to the central relationship, resulting in a case of squandered potential that could have been so much more.

Rating:
Verdict: Flimsy, frothy and far too ridiculous

This is a reprint of my review which was first published on Rotten Tomatoes about 2 years ago. It appears here to mirror a series of reviews I had done for RT entitled 'From Burton to Nolan'.

The Dark Knight (USA, 2008)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart

The word 'masterpiece' is batted around far too often these days, and with The Dark Knight it's sadly inappropriate. Most of what makes Christopher Nolan a great modern filmmaker is up there on screen, and you cannot fault it for being a blockbuster which is attempting to address such relevant and complicated ideas. But while it is a general success, it is not as disciplined or focussed as Batman Begins and does not reward repeat viewing like The Prestige. It deserves to be celebrated and admired for its intelligence, but one must inevitably acknowledge that it isn't flawless.Having barely put a foot wrong in his previous films, The Dark Knight is the first glimpse of Christopher Nolan ever so slightly losing control. Like Batman Begins the film is a little too long, but it also feels slightly bloated, with much of the dialogue being rushed or mumbled in order to cram in all the ideas. It's almost as though there was enough plot and themes in here for two films, but rather than shoot back-to-back sequels, like The Matrix, Nolan decided to compress them down into one. Considering how mediocre The Matrix sequels were, this was not in itself a bad idea, but we still have to live with the fact that there are too many stories going on.Moreover, the film is edited and structured in a peculiar way. Where Batman Begins progressed in a defined direction, The Dark Knight feels more like a series of philosophical vignettes rather than something more progressive and incremental. The set-pieces are undeniably brilliant, but with the exception of the final sequence with the ships, you could put these set-pieces in almost any order and the film would feel the same. It's not terrible because of it, but it does mean that there is less cumulative tension than there could have been.This feeling of disorder is bolstered by the increased spectacle. Of course, being a blockbuster we don't expect things to be quiet, but there is a feeling watching all the explosions of Nolan pandering to the popcorn crowd just a little too much. In Batman Begins there were two hours of substance and character development, followed by 20 minutes of explosions to make up the trailer. In The Dark Knight, with its themes of escalation and chaos, it seems right that there should be more carnage, up to a point. But the carnage Nolan puts on screen eventually becomes repetitive, and his decision to film some of it in IMAX adds to the impression that he is overcompensating.These criticisms make it seem that Nolan's film is a failure, and when compared to the rest of his output, it is disappointing. But it remains head and shoulders above your average superhero blockbuster. The discipline of the first film has been compromised, but the film retains a desire to explore characters rather than just blow everything up. If nothing else, you have to admire Nolan for being able to take such an ideas-heavy film and sell it to such a wide audience.Thematically, this picks up the reins of the first film, dealing with the idea of understanding one's enemy as the means to defeating them. The difference is that the Joker is not a Nietzschean figure like Ra's al Ghul, someone who becomes evil by believing so strongly that he is doing good. In fighting him Batman still risks becoming like his enemies, but this lack of morality means that the cost to him will be greater. Killing the Joker seems necessary, but it would destroy Batman's moral code and undermine the belief that good can overcome evil in a non-Nietzschean way.The film is quite nihilistic in suggesting that even at its weakest, evil can triumph over good. The Joker's fate at the end remains uncertain, but the revelations surrounding Harvey Dent give a sense of him winning even though his direct influence is curtailed. The Joker's evil is allegorical to terrorism, in that his influence is fragmented and disparate. He does not take power by marching in with an army; he infiltrates, twisting, turning and double-crossing. Dent and Batman are the dove and the hawk trying to uphold rules in the face of chaos, and both are essentially destroyed in the process.The thing which marks out The Dark Knight from Nolan's previous work is that it is relatively conventional in its storytelling. It's ridiculous to call it 'dumbing down', but there is none of the jumping back and forth in time which made The Prestige so gripping. The themes are presented in a much more upfront way, both in the dialogue and the precise mechanics of the moral dilemmas. You could almost accuse Nolan of ramming ideas down the audience's throats, but thankfully the script and the characters are good enough to prevent this.The film has similar character development to Batman Returns, which was criticised for sidelining Batman in favour of the svillains. But that's always been the point. Since Batman is a superhero who uses cunning rather than powers, there has to be a section of the film in which he is the underdog; if nothing else it makes his eventual triumph more powerful and palatable. What makes The Dark Knight clever is that it does all this while withholding the Joker for a long time. Apart from the opening bank raid, the first act largely concerns itself with Lau and the Mob.As with all Nolan films, the performances are really great. Heath Ledger was generally a lightweight, but as the Joker he manages to channel Malcolm McDowell and make him truly terrifying. It's easily his best performance, although like the film it has become a victim of its own hype. Like the Scream killer, it has been so widely parodied that it isn't quite as scary anymore. Christian Bale remains convincing, and as before it is right that he should be a little sidelined so that the great evil is acknowledged.Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are both warm and affable, and the script does allow for more humour this time round - for instance, when Rachel Dawes and Batman land on the car, she turns to him and says, "Let's not do that again". Interestingly enough, the film glosses over the most interesting character development: the individuals closest to Bruce Wayne finding out his identity. This was explored in Batman Returns in some detail, but here there are several conversations between Bruce and Rachel in which she knows he is Batman, which somewhat undercuts the drama.The Dark Knight contains many promising performances, along with stunning visuals from Wally Pfister who gives Gotham a grungy and decaying edge. In the end it struggles to completely control all the rogue elements, but at least Nolan doesn't fall into the same trap as Sam Raimi on Spiderman 3, namely throwing everything at the screen in the hope that some of it will work. If Batman Begins was Nolan's equivalent of Alien, then this is his Aliens: more action-packed and slightly less compelling, but still weighty, intelligent and interesting. One only hopes that Inception will not be his Alien 3.

Rating:
Verdict: Bloated but containing brilliance