on Movies

Movie Review time:  (warning,  do give away some pertinent details of these movies which could spoil the film for you.  I won't explicitly tell you the ending, but many of the details lead directly to the endings)

Over the last few days I have seen The Adjustment Bureau, Limitless, and Source Code.

The Adjustment Bureau:  3 out of 5 stars.
Matt Damon stars as a rising politician who has a chance encounter with a lovely woman that changes his mind about a speech, thereby altering his own fate.  A mysterious group of men control fate, and have set up this "chance encounter".  However, due to an error, he runs into the woman again and this sets off a chain of reactions in time.  The Adjustment Bureau must correct the time line by keeping Damon and the woman apart.  As the old saying goes, 'you cannot un-ring a bell', so Damon is rightfully aggravated and decides to fight the "powers that be".

The movie plods along through the encounters between Damon and the woman and the pace doesn't really pick up until Damon discovers what the Bureau does.  Even then we must watch as Damon gets more and more frustrated.  Finally the movie and the characters take off when Damon decides to fight fate.  The message of self-determination versus prewritten fate is heavy handed but necessary to the plot.  The Christian demagoguery is a bit overdone and by the end of the movie everyone should know what will happen or they just haven't been paying attention.

Limitless: 4 out of 5 stars.
The Hangover's Bradley Cooper stars as a deadbeat writer who's laziness and procrastination drives everything away from him.  His "dealer" former brother-in-law slips him a dose of a new experimental drug which stimulates the "unused" portion of the brain, turning a deadbeat into an intellectual and financial genius.  The memory call-ups seem a bit like the television show "Chuck", while the concept of the drug's side effects and waring-off symptoms is reminiscent of the novel "Flowers for Algernon".

Cooper does a pretty good job being the quasi-hipster turned into the Wall Street douchebag.  The story is fairly well thought out and has a bit of a surprise ending.

Source Code: 4 out of 5 stars.
Cow-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who must use 8 minutes of the past to stop a train from blowing up.  Each time he returns to the train he gathers just a little bit more information.  Of course his mission is derailed (pun intended) when he begins to care about one of the passengers and about his own mysterious past.  The script is well crafted and the mysteries are layered over themselves.  The big boss Ruttledge is the only down-side to the film as his acting seems stilted and amateurish.  The end of the film probably creates a few more questions than it should, but time travel/alternate realities tend to do that.