Slow and painful movie
351828
The concept of this movie was interesting but the way the story played out lacked authenticity. The story unfolded slowly and the ending was pointless.
4280239
I saw this movie and I thought how the movie went from the end to the beginning of the movie that was interesting to me.  The rape scene was beyond belief to see and uncomfortable to watch it was very long and brutal to watch.
2960573
I'm a big fan of most of the cast in this movie, but it was so slow and boring.  I was hoping for it to pick up, but it never did.  Horrible movie!
1013173
The acting is painful to watch. Sorry, guys--I wanted to like it and I want to support clean, uplifting movies. But this one just wasn't worth suffering through.
2949994
The movie was slow and when you couple it with British humor (which I do like and appreciate) you get a picture that is hard to sit through. Two men, one with issues, traveling around bickering is not my idea of an entertaining evening. I can see why some people might like this film but it is for a very specific audience in my opinion and one which I am not a part of. Sorry.
983988
What a movie this could or should have been. Just think of it, Robert De Niro in front of and behind the camera, Francis Ford Coppola as one of the executive producers and starring Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. Honey, get the popcorn!

At least that's how it should have gone. Unfortunately the recent '06 film `The Good Shepherd' falls far short of my pre-viewing expectations. It is exceedingly slow, too long and the farthest thing from being a thriller than one could imagine. Damon sleep walks through this 2 hour, 48 minute snooze fest and Angelina is delegated to the role of a long suffering ignored housewife (as if that could happen).

Alas, it could have been great. Who wouldn't enjoy a good conspiracy film involving an all powerful secret society like the infamous "Skull and Bones" working their way through the highest levels of American society and politics. I sure would, have you seen one?
1714779
I am giving this 2 stars because I believe they spent the money to try and make it a good movie, unfortunately they failed.  This is a horribly graphic movie, and INCREDIBLY SLOW movie.  It was terrible, how this movie won an Academy Award is beyond me.  I know the subject matter was dark to begin with, but there was so much unnecessary violence and gore, not to mention an absurd amount of time wasted on him walking, his dreams and fighting.  I knew there would be fighting, but by the last fight I got up and started cleaning, came back and my husband said they are still fighting, it was the last fight scene with 2 men, not an epic battle, 2 men for 15 minutes.  Wait for this to come out on HBO, don't waste your money.  If you think "oh it's  woman thing, she doesn't like gore" I am going to tell you my husband disliked it just as much.  And if you're expecting much acting from Leonardo, not happening,  He dreams, he fights, he walks, he shoots, he walks, he fights, he dreams,  he walks, he shoots, he walks, It just goes on and on.  I've reviewed 2 movies on here in all these years, despite having rented over a hundred.  This one was terrible, and David and Goliath was the worst movie I've ever seen in my entire life.  I gave it 1 star so since this one wasn't as bad at that one I'll give 2 stars.
4233937
I am a fan of British film and am used to their subtlety and relative emotionless portrayals. This one takes the cake, however. This is supposed to be a passionate piece about justice, suffering, heartache, budding love, and breaking through legal obstacles, but you don't actually ever SEE how painful it is or FEEL the joy. Declarations of love are said with the passion of, "Please pass the biscuits" or "Nice weather we're having." It also relies on dialog to move the plot forward so it's HEAVY on talking. They are talking all the time. Rarely show anything. The lack of visual and auditory variety made me tired. It's got it's high points, but it struggles to get there. I think the average viewer would find this a chore.
4277209
This film wants to be a warm and fuzzy family movie about friendship, loyalty, and learning to accept people of other races.  It has a few problems going in.  There's a disturbing subplot in which David's mother Ruth attempts to seduce new Jamaican neighbor Dennis, which frankly makes the movie inappropriate for children. The dialogue is difficult to understand, at least for an American, though it's hard to say whether this is due to the accents or the recording. The movie is also very slow-paced and could have done with some editing.

A crucial scene is one in which David rejects the daughter of his Jamaican neighbors, telling her she can't come to his birthday party.  She is terribly hurt by this and cuts off their friendship.  I thought this was a little unfair on her part.  The fact is that children of this age prefer to play in gender-segregated groups, and this is found cross-culturally. While it certainly could happen for a close friendship like this to develop between a boy and a girl, conducting such a friendship in front of the boy's male friends would certainly have led to teasing, if not worse.  This would have happened even if the girl had been white.  While being loyal to friends is fine, promoting the idea that gender shouldn't matter in friendship strikes me as silly.

The film's central message, that people of other races and customs enrich our lives, has some truth, but in our time it has been taken to an absurd extreme.  Multiculturalism started out innocently enough as a way to avoid genocidal massacres like the Holocaust, and bring peace and harmony to the world.  It hasn't worked out that way.  Immigration by significant numbers of people of alien religion, customs, and ethnicity is extremely disruptive to any country or neighborhood.  Community feeling and trust between neighbors naturally declines when such immigration occurs.  Britain in recent decades has accepted far too many such immigrants, with destructive consequences that are becoming hideously clear. What were these Jamaicans doing in Britain anyway?  Why did they leave Jamaica?  Jamaica faces desperate problems these days, and trying to solve them by exporting some of its population only creates more problems elsewhere.

Overall, I would suggest skipping this movie.
1297073
I wanted to like this film. I love the actors, Kirsten Dunst and Kiefer Sutherland, as well as John Hurt, among others. The movie is rather slow paced.  Rather than give a synopsis, which every other review does here, I'll tell you the problems I have with the movie.  Please note there are SPOILERS!:......

1.  How did John die?  Was he murdered, kicked by a horse, or did he kill himself knowing about the impending doom?
2.  How was nobody in the wedding party aware of potential appocolyptic even that loomed in just a few short days?  This would be major headline news that people would be aware of before the power went out.
3.  The film's synopsis on Amazon seemed to imply that the planets coming extremely close would induce chaos.  However, aside from Kirsten Dunst's strange behavior, I don't see anything out of place other than a family and associates that do not get along too well.
4.  When a movie is done well, you feel empathy for the other characters, and sometimes you can even imagine yourself in their own shoes and feel fear.  I felt nothing even close to that.
5.  I am not an astronomer, but I know that it's not possible for another planet to intersect with earth's orbit. There are no star systems close enough for this to happen.  Even if we could not see it, it would be detected by the light it blocks from other stars and the gravitational effects of other bodies around it.  Therefore, the entire premise of the film is just absurd.

You can see that the reviews are all over the place.  You may be one of the people who gains something from taking in this film.  So don't discount it just because I didn't like it.  Read some of the positive reviews and see if it's something you may enjoy.
4249984
I saw this movie years ago. I don't know why I rented again.  It was so slow and boring
730813
Saw on Netflix streaming.  Way way too long in parts.  Very slow and drawn out angst -- not for me.  Shooting and fighting was up to par but nothing special and even that was too much.  Too many WTFs for how a character got somewhere suddenly, and the smart woman was way too benumbed by the violence to accept her insanity as pitiful -- she should have tried a lot harder and thought a lot more about survival, but noooooooooooo we the audience had to groan TOO MANY TIMES.  Dark Asian morality tale.  Not for me. Never at any time was I sure about what was going down, and that includes the last minute of the film. Four stars because it might be a great movie for a large demographic segment and I want to be honest about the film's excellence, but TOO MANY TOOs and NOT FOR ME.
742580
Extremely long movie.  Interest started to wane with about 45 minutes left.
525616
I never ever end a movie in the middle but I couldn't finish this... Despite such an awesome cast, this was painfully slow and dull. I really wanted to like it but it didn't capture my interest. Sorry Jon Favreau, I still think you're great though!
119819
This a mostly slow paced movie, that takes forever to get to the story you know is coming, as text on the screen constantly pops up telling us how many days are left until the storm hits. It's not helped by the fact that the movie is bookended by a poorly done Modern Family style where they sit on the couch and talk to the camera mokumentary, where Duncan sets up the tale (the movie in the middle is basically his response to a question). Before the storm arrives we basically see John Travolta as a biker drifter type who has asked his brother to let him be a linesman. However he's a bit of a slacker, more into showing off his new truck then concentrating on the job, so when his brother has to fix a mistake he missed, he ends up becoming the guardian of his brother's daughter, as the electrical company he works for obviously has no workplace health and safety guidelines in place for dealing with this situation and phones the brother's wife instead of sending someone around to break the news, who highly stressed dies on the road rushing to the scene.

That's basically what this movie is about. The cost cutting and lack of work place health and safety and common sense if it gets in the way of doing things quickly and restoring the power, on an electricity line that is old and hasn't really had the money put into maintaining it, which endangers the lives of the crew Travolta's character is in charge of, who is now the best and most careful tolerates no nonsense from his men linesman around. This is one of those typical management and those in the safety of their office based positions (which has a map of all their electricity lines like a subway map where when lines go down it lights up the line in red) being portrayed as stupid and evil only caring about the bottom line, prepared to sacrifice workers out in the field's lives to save a few cents here and there. There's a side story of Bailey, Travolta's character's niece being hassled by her uncle to fill out university application forms, which she's clearly avoiding. Bailey has broken up with a guy (Duncan) who her uncle hates (although we never learn why) and is mad at him for most of the film. There's also a guy fresh out of prison who likes to harass Bailey, although again there is no backstory told about him, we just know he's obviously a threat to her safety but no idea why he is obsessed with her. When we first meet him his employer threatens if he doesn't get back to work he'll call his parole officer, yet this guy doesn't seem concerned that stuff he does in public such as at a bar would put him back behind bars.

It's a pretty predictable movie, there isn't really a storyline in this film that you don't work out early how it's going to play out. Shockingly we learn at the end that 100s of people who do this in real life have been killed on the job. Travolta has an obvious (perhaps because we've seen in so many films) fake accent. It's very distracting. Duncan and the ex con characters look pretty similar too, which makes scenes like when they're fighting and even when they aren't together hard to work out which one they are. Overall it's a film that's watchable, I don't know if this was a made originally for TV movie, but it's around that quality. It's the only film I can think of that is set in the world of those who fix downed power lines and restore power during storms, so it has that uniqueness going for it. It's a shame it took an hour though to get to the reason most people are probably watching it though, leaving us with a story that was to be frank pretty boring and uninteresting up to then.
3215410
I so wanted this movie to be great. But like Gettysburg, it just isn't. The acting is stiff and one dimensional and the pace is so slow I gave up and had to come back to finish watching later. This movie catches none of the magic of the civil war.
892459
Movie is slow, you never care much about the characters. Your time is better spent on another movie.