There is a powerful story of redemption in this film. I found the main plot beats clever with some story reveals surprising. The premise hooked me and Michael Keaton is a cool guy so why not I thought.
At around the 50 min mark, I realised the slow pace wasn't going away. There is a lot of fat that could have been cut to shorten the runtime if this pace was chosen. The story doesn't provide enough meat to warrant the 2 hours. I thought the dementia element would have been utilised in a more creative ways from the premise. Some extremely heavy handed dialog especially in the first act got me wondering did I make a mistake watching this.
The story wasn't executed and structured well enough to have a much larger cathartic impact so the audience could relate to the characters on a deeper level. Fight scenes felt clunky in the edit but I suppose this isn't an action film. The 2nd act suffers the most from all the negatives and I did get bored when the anticipation and thrill should have been rising.
If this was going to be an action film, it would have been cool to see the protagonist forget he's in a fight, forgot who's the right person to hit, forgot key details at key moments. Since they didn't go this route, the film needed more tension in another way. It felt like events were just unfolding with no real suspense.
It was cool seeing Al Pacino for the few minutes he's in this. James Marsden does a decent job.
It's a hard task to direct a memory based film when the bar is set at Memento.
At around the 50 min mark, I realised the slow pace wasn't going away. There is a lot of fat that could have been cut to shorten the runtime if this pace was chosen. The story doesn't provide enough meat to warrant the 2 hours. I thought the dementia element would have been utilised in a more creative ways from the premise. Some extremely heavy handed dialog especially in the first act got me wondering did I make a mistake watching this.
The story wasn't executed and structured well enough to have a much larger cathartic impact so the audience could relate to the characters on a deeper level. Fight scenes felt clunky in the edit but I suppose this isn't an action film. The 2nd act suffers the most from all the negatives and I did get bored when the anticipation and thrill should have been rising.
If this was going to be an action film, it would have been cool to see the protagonist forget he's in a fight, forgot who's the right person to hit, forgot key details at key moments. Since they didn't go this route, the film needed more tension in another way. It felt like events were just unfolding with no real suspense.
It was cool seeing Al Pacino for the few minutes he's in this. James Marsden does a decent job.
It's a hard task to direct a memory based film when the bar is set at Memento.