| Overall Grade: |
B- |
|
| Story: |
C+ |
|
|
| Acting: |
B |
|
|
| Direction: |
B- |
|
|
| Visuals: |
B- |
|
|
OVERLONG LONG FLICK WITH SEVERE IDENTITY CRISIS
by JimF (movies profile)
Dec 23, 2007
202
of
299 people found this review helpful
About two-thirds into the three hour "The Good Shepherd", you will begin to wonder "where are they going with this?" After about another twenty minutes you will wonder when the movie is going to end.
It's not that The Good Shepherd is a poor film. In fact, it is not that bad. The movie follows its protagonist Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) from his youth at Yale (and his membership in Skull and Bones) through his recruitment as an intelligence operative in WW2, followed by his post war spying of the Soviet threat, and right through the Bay of Pigs debacle.
Its length is arguably excessive at three hours with perhaps as much as an hour of what I consider needless background narrative. The movie has so many characters, so many needless side plots which wear down the story's momentum.
At the core of the film's problem, however, is its identity crisis. Is The Good Shepherd supposed to be a fictionalized account of the early days of the OSA-CIA? Is it supposed to be a spy story theorizing what major intelligence breakdown which led to the failure of The Bay of Pigs Invasion? Or is it a character story of Wilson, a paradox of a man who is moral and immoral at the same time, who manages to remain stoic but loyal in spite of personal and professional crises?
The movie features an all-star cast from Angeline Jolie as his wife of a loveless marriage, John Turtoro as his aide, Alec Baldwin as Wilson's counterpart in the FBI and William Hurt as a high level executive in the CIA organization, plus countless others.
When the final frame convinced the theater's audience that indeed the end credits were on the way, I have never seen such a mass exodus for the exit doors in my entire life. It was certainly evidence that I was not the only one who found The Good Shepherd bordering on tiresome. |
My Public Profile 
