Or that’s how it seemed, anyway. The film details a CIA agent’s efforts to find out who leaked the landing zone for the Bay of Pigs invasion to the other side. In a series of insanely long flashbacks we find out how he became part of the OSS and then the CIA. This film is really notable for only a couple of reasons:
[ul]
[li]It’s something like 3 goddamned hours long.[/li][li]Angelina Jolie looks better in this film than in anything else I’ve seen her in.[/li][li]There’s hardly any continuity errors that I could notice.[/li][li]It’s directed by Robert Deniro.[/li][li]It’s the first thing I’ve seen Joe Pesci in in ages.[/li][li]Keir Dullea’s in it.[/li][li]If they started the film with an event that happened at about the 2 hour mark, it would have been a helluva lot better of a movie.[/li][/ul]It looked pretty, but despite the fact that it intercuts between events happening about 30 years apart, Matt Damon and Jolie never seem to age.
There’s not a single major character I could give a shit about, the only one I found interesting was Damon’s deaf girlfriend during his college years. The one incident that happens, that if they’d started the movie with, that would have made it a good movie (and I’m not spoiling anything here, as it’s a fairly minor part of the film) is when they’re interrogating a Soviet defector in the late 1950s/early 1960s. They give him LSD to get him to talk, and one of the things that he says is that the whole Soviet Union is a lie, they don’t have any spare parts, and the military is a rust bucket with paint to hide the rust, but the US needed the Soviet Union to be a dangerous threat to the US in order to prop up our military-industrial complex. Had that been the opener of the film and they shown that was the case, it would have been worth watching. As it is, it’s a torture test to see if you can actually stomach lifeless characters on the screen for 3 [del]years[/del] hours.
Oh, and the source of the leak?Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie’s ugly-ass son is banging some mixed race chick in Africa and spills the beans to her because he’s in love with her and is going to marry her. (Uh, yeah, like the grandson of a US Senator and the son of a CIA agent, who is also a CIA agent and a Yale grad is going to be able to even consider marrying a black chick in nineteen sixty fucking one! :rolleyes: ) He’s ratted out to the CIA by a Soviet agent codenamed Ulysses, who hopes to turn Matt Damon’s character. Why Damon’s character didn’t whack Ulysses in Europe in 1945 is never explained. There. I’ve just saved you 3 boobless hours.