The Adjustment Bureau - Movie review

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U/A; Drama/Romance
Dir: George Nolfi
Cast: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Terence Stamp
Rating:'''1/2

WHAT'S IT ABOUT: Promising young Congressman David Norris has chance meeting with girl of his dreams. He loses the election to the US Senate but is more dejected about not getting the name of the girl. He meets her on a bus weeks later, gets her number, promises to call. What he sees next at work is what changes his life forever. In exchange for keeping the secret he has seen, he can go on with his life as if nothing ever happened. If he doesn't, his memories will be erased. Fair deal? Not when men in suits-n-hats also tell him he can never meet that girl again.

WHAT'S HOT: Who doesn't love young politicians? They're hungry, they're charismatic, they've got it all. When do they not live their life according to plan? Assuming that's the case, you might think the people 'watching' their every move, would have it easy. David Norris (Damon) is anything but easy for his watcher Harry (Mackie). It is 'annoying' characters like David, who don't stick to the plan, that take the story forward. Pretty predictable, so far. Then there's the little matter of keeping secrets. Tell and "we'll erase your brain" (actual dialogue). Again, textbook. It's love, actually, that is the dealbreaker. Take a sci-fi story adaptation and inject healthy doses of love, longing and intrigue and you have a winner. Everyone's happy. All's well with the world.
What drives this film is the effortless chemistry between Blunt and Damon. When Elise (Blunt) tells David that she's a 'hopeless romantic', you believe every word. When David expresses his hopelessness while trying to explain his long absences, it's actually palpable. Mackie is sufficiently sympathetic, Slattery is adequately sarcastic and Stamp is coldly exact. Debutant director George Nolfi wrote the screenplay for the last Bourne flick and the edginess of that flick is apparent in the action of this one. The confident start begins to lose focus only in the last few reels.

WHAT'S NOT: The film has received press for being something of an Inception-meets-Bourne. While this film can do without the comparisons, it is far less superior to the former (intellectually) and several shades less action-y than the latter (the Bourne series set benchmarks for action flicks). I'm a grammar nut and some of the dialogue is decidedly devoid of syntax. In other places, it makes the conversations seem rather dull and mundane. Emily Blunt's accent oscillates sharply between Brit and US English never quite settling on one for too long. Also, if life were that precisely designed and adjusted, and if Harry's explanation for the presence of the Corporation's existence and purpose were really believable, it would boil down to this conclusion: God/The Chairman intermittently likes playing control freak playing cat-and-mouse via proxy ever so often. The going through doors trick via hat and doorknobs seems oh-so-Fringe for a while as do the watchers' maps. Gimmicky, at best.

WHAT TO DO: Adjustment is not for people who scoff at romances, who hated The Matrix or Inception completely, and aren't content with simple explanations. It's the variety of ingredients that draws you in. Make an adjustment, catch this film.