Starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery and Terence Stamp
What is free will? Do we have a soulmate? Are we the masters of our destiny? Or are we simply pawns being pushed around a chess board as part of some greater plan?
These questions and others are glossed over or ignored entirely through some of the worst dialogue and ridiculous scenarios of the year in The Adjustment Bureau.
Matt Damon plays a congressman running for Senate who falls in love with Emily Blunt's ballet dancer. Only the grand plan calls for him not to fall in love her. Enter the Adjustment Bureau to help reset the board by some subtle mental manipulation. And the use of doors. And hats. Lots of hats.
The cast is great. Damon and Blunt have real chemistry. John Slattery leads the Adjustment Bureau members in their day to day operations which requires him to wear a suit and he's more than proven an aptitutde for that on Mad Men.
The biggest problem is the script. I hate watching a movie where I am consciously rewriting the dialogue while I am watching it. The movie could have shown us how the Adjustment Bureau works. Or it could have left the bureau as a mysterious force, making us wonder if everything that happens was chance or done by design. Instead, it shows the bureau members standing around, talking about what a pain Matt Damon is.
The rules they operate under are inconsistent. At one point, Slattery trips Damon with a flick of his mind. So why do the members of the Bureau spend the entire movie chasing Damon? They threaten to reset Damon's mind if he goes against them, he goes against them constantly, and they... complain. Don't get me wrong. It's REALLY dramatic complaining.
The movie is unnecessarily crowded with characters. The Bureau has a lot of members we are introduced to throughout the film, but most of them were unnecessary. Hell, two of the main members (Slattery and Stamp) were completely interchangeable.
The central thesis of the movie is that free will and love should win out over the idea of a divine plan. But does the movie even support that? Damon and Blunt end up together, but it's made clear that it is because the divine plan gets rewritten to support that. They still aren't really in control.
The Adjustment Bureau is not as smart as it pretends to be. It's a five-year old child who learns some big words, but has no understanding of their meaning. Sure, it sounds cute to hear him stumble over multi-syllabic words and use them in nonsensical ways, but you aren't about to take that seriously. No matter how hard the child wants you to.
*1/2 out of *****
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