Ugh. Where to start with The Adjustment Bureau, I dunno. This is a much too complicated actiony sci-fi-ish movie about angels, fate and love. It's so banal there are no words to properly describe it. It does make me interested in reading the Philip K. Dick story it's based on, because I can't imagine that's as bad as this and I'd be interested to see how writer/director George Nolfi screwed this up so much.
There really isn't much of a plot to this movie, but rather just some stuff that happens. David Norris (Matt Damon) is a rising political star who has a reputation for being a bad-boy. He loses a Senate election but meets his dream girl Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt)in the process. They lose contact and he goes on with his life. There are a bunch of weird guys in Mad-Men-looking suits who wear fedoras and all look at these iPad-like things with maps on them. It seems they have some way of following people on their special devices and have directions they're looking for the people to move in.
For them it's very important that David and Elise don't meet again of fall in love, but they're the gang that can't shoot straight and mess up all sorts of things. Ultimately they're exposed to David and it becomes clear that they work for God and they're angels, but they use business-like words, so they're working for the Chairman and work in an office in Manhattan (the Credit Suisse building, for what it's worth). The next hour is spent with David trying to find Elise, then finding her and then the dudes in suits and hats showing up to tell him they can't be together - but nobody knows why this is.
This film is basically Inception meets Defending Your Life, although unlike both of those films, it's never totally clear what the goal of the film is or when or at what point it would end. We see a bunch of chases and a bunch of guys in nice hats, but we never really care about anything that's going on because we don't really understand what's going on. Basically it's just a movie about a couple who want to be together, but are not allowed to for no particular reason. This might work for an act or two of a film, but is not really a full story.
There are a lot of questions that come up that don't make any sense. It seems that God and the angels are working against fate and chance and that humans have no free-will. I can take that last part, but in a world with God, why can't God control everything? How is it that God is just as much at the mercy of fate as humans are at God's mercy? I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say it's one of the dullest and most recycled things I've seen in a long time.
This movie sucks. What's worse, I think the whole point for the "men-in-nice-suits" aesthetic is clearly pulled straight from Mad Men (as is the casting of John Slattery as one of the main guys). I worry that the only reason to have the fedoras integral to the plot is to influence people to start wearing fedoras again... like Men in Black did for black sunglasses. Ooof.
Stars: .5 of 4
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