I can be positive. Look at me: Greg Kinnear (of 'As good as it gets' fame) tries his best in this movie. He says his lines with such conviction, it's almost sad. Laurie Metcalf is as good as she always is as the neurotic lawyer-cum-postal worker Rebecca. Greg Kinnear's character, Tom Turner is...is...heck, I've run out of positive stuff.
I'm sorry. It's just that this movie tries to tackle a subject matter far bigger than itself. And it does it, well, badly. Let me walk you through it:
Tom Turner is some professional scam artist, who has a gambling debt. He is conning poor innocents out of their cash, until he gets busted by completely unbelievable undercover police officers more trigger-happy than Dirty Harry. He gets the completely unbelievable court order: go to jail, or get a 9-5 job for a year. He gets a job through two completely unbelievable happenings, involving his cousin being the policeman dragging him out of a post office cue (presumably for noticing the deadly secret of the post office: that even though there are huge lines in the post office, there is one register open with nobody using it, which Tom just walks up to).
He gets a completely unbelievable job in the 'Dead Letters Office', which is a huge messy office, filled to the brim with letters, with 5-6 full-time workers. These work on the mail that has been adressed wrong so it can't be sent on. We're supposed to believe that there are so many sloppy letter senders? Oh, never mind.
Tom discovers a place with a lot of left over jewellery, sent nowhere, and he pockets it ALL, even though he's been told he's watched. Sadly, he's rumbled, so he puts it ALL into a FedEx package and mails it. Not to himself, oh no, but to some random adress he found on a letter to God. You know, for a professional conman, he's pretty stupid. The only guy more stupid than him is the mail sorter that doesn't notice a fully grown man sliding down his mail chute one foot away from him. Watch the movie, you'll. No, on second thoughts, don't.
So, inevetably, they start reading letters from God and want to help the people themselves. Tom totally forgets his character AND his gambling debts and starts acting...you guessed it...completely unbelievable. In one particularly completely unbelievable scene, they save an old man from walking into the ocean on a crowded beach. Ah yes. That's the most efficient way to kill yourself, isn't it. Anyway, they fish him out (he's completely dry), and he gripes a bit, and then that bit goes absolutely nowhere. They build to this moment for 20 minutes, and then it fizzles. Bah.
It escalates, as it would do, and it ends with Tom being a bigger man, and we all learned a big lesson about helping others. No, wait. Sorry. It ends with a ludicrous, out-of-place courtroom sequence, where two dogs are interviewed for no reason. It's a roller-coaster. Avoid it like the plague.
The short review: This movie was boring. I picked up my guitar after seeing the Sylvia Plath part and practised playing "Superstitious" by Stevie Wonder as badly as I could. I don't know why; this movie just made me want to....
I'm sorry. It's just that this movie tries to tackle a subject matter far bigger than itself. And it does it, well, badly. Let me walk you through it:
Tom Turner is some professional scam artist, who has a gambling debt. He is conning poor innocents out of their cash, until he gets busted by completely unbelievable undercover police officers more trigger-happy than Dirty Harry. He gets the completely unbelievable court order: go to jail, or get a 9-5 job for a year. He gets a job through two completely unbelievable happenings, involving his cousin being the policeman dragging him out of a post office cue (presumably for noticing the deadly secret of the post office: that even though there are huge lines in the post office, there is one register open with nobody using it, which Tom just walks up to).
He gets a completely unbelievable job in the 'Dead Letters Office', which is a huge messy office, filled to the brim with letters, with 5-6 full-time workers. These work on the mail that has been adressed wrong so it can't be sent on. We're supposed to believe that there are so many sloppy letter senders? Oh, never mind.
Tom discovers a place with a lot of left over jewellery, sent nowhere, and he pockets it ALL, even though he's been told he's watched. Sadly, he's rumbled, so he puts it ALL into a FedEx package and mails it. Not to himself, oh no, but to some random adress he found on a letter to God. You know, for a professional conman, he's pretty stupid. The only guy more stupid than him is the mail sorter that doesn't notice a fully grown man sliding down his mail chute one foot away from him. Watch the movie, you'll. No, on second thoughts, don't.
So, inevetably, they start reading letters from God and want to help the people themselves. Tom totally forgets his character AND his gambling debts and starts acting...you guessed it...completely unbelievable. In one particularly completely unbelievable scene, they save an old man from walking into the ocean on a crowded beach. Ah yes. That's the most efficient way to kill yourself, isn't it. Anyway, they fish him out (he's completely dry), and he gripes a bit, and then that bit goes absolutely nowhere. They build to this moment for 20 minutes, and then it fizzles. Bah.
It escalates, as it would do, and it ends with Tom being a bigger man, and we all learned a big lesson about helping others. No, wait. Sorry. It ends with a ludicrous, out-of-place courtroom sequence, where two dogs are interviewed for no reason. It's a roller-coaster. Avoid it like the plague.
The short review: This movie was boring. I picked up my guitar after seeing the Sylvia Plath part and practised playing "Superstitious" by Stevie Wonder as badly as I could. I don't know why; this movie just made me want to....