4 stars
this is a good movie but long and tedious
but worse than that it’s extremely disjointed
it’s basically several different stories that are interlinked through two generations of characters in what is basically three separate parts of the movie that could have been a trilogy …
so it’s a surprisingly classy, quality film but it’s hard to enjoy due to it’s long and disjointed nature …
to clarify, the movie is NOT SLOW in pace, rather it’s really 3 movies in one, and it should have been released in 3 parts but nobody would have watched the 2nd part after the way the 1st one ends so they had to do it as one movie …
but doing it as one movie makes it almost impossible to enjoy because you get into one story and then it switches to a different story and then to a third one …
which are closely related yet not the same …
my final verdict is: good but tedious and disjointed.
the problem with this movie is it’s in a weird place where it’s not something you can consider entertainment yet also not something you can consider a cerebral / philosophical film - it’s kind of stuck in the middle
even though it’s told through the story and not any kind of long speeches it still has a certain cosmopolis ( 2012 ) like tediousness to it …
it starts out well but by the time you think the movie is over it’s not even at halfway point and that’s where it turns into a quagmire in which you realize what you thought was the entire movie was just the setup for unpacking some issues that will take another hour and a half …
the first hour feels like a decent action / romantic movie with Eva Mendes delivering some memorable nipples visible through her shirt but then in the last 1.5 hours it’s a tedious ( yes that word again ) examination of issues such as corruption, morality, destiny, family …
this isn’t a Lars Von Trier movie or a Yorgos Lanthimos movie or a Stanley Kubrick movie but it’s a fairly serious movie compared to some of the trash i watched recently
the only other movie i recently watched that wasn’t trash was “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” ( 2005 )
4 stars