Almost anything with the name "Soderbergh" or "George Clooney" attached to it.
Most recently? The American.
How anyone can like that pile of self-indulgent shit is beyond me. Actually, I think it's because it's one of those movies that means you're smart if you add it to your top 10 list. In my humble opinion, it just means you're either a pretentious film-snob, you're no fun at all to be around, you're old, or a combination of the above.
I can't believe the trailer advertised it as an assassin movie. No, it's not an assassin movie. That would imply assassinations. The movie is about an assassin, yes. But you wouldn't call a movie about Obama clipping his toe nails a political thriller.
I just re-watched the trailer for the first time since I saw the movie. The trailer is exactly what the movie is, except each scene is about 10 minutes longer while feeling 50 minutes longer.
Here's the basic plot:
George Clooney sleeps with a woman in Sweden and shows off his sexy old chest. He walks around with the woman and a guy tries to kill them. He kills the guy, then the woman. Clooney looks sad for about 10 minutes, driving around. He talks to some guy cryptically. Clooney heads to a small Italian village. It takes him about 15 minutes to drive there since he constantly stops to take pictures. Right now, I had no idea what was going on, but I gathered he was meant to go kill someone at the village.
Finally, Clooney gets to the village. Cue a hundred different shots of bells clanging, the empty village, and... Yeah. Pretty much that, at different angles. Then you get to see it all again when Clooney takes pictures of it. Eventually, he gets pieces of a gun in the mail and meets some pastor. The movie then devolves into a basic routine:
- Fix the gun
- Eat with the pastor
- Fix the gun
- Walk around the empty village
- Fix the gun
- Go to the park
- Fix the gun
- Walk around the empty village
- Fix the gun
- See a butterfly
- Fix the gun
- Repeat
Eventually he meets the obligatory love interest.
I really wish I'd have walked out of this, but my friends didn't want to. The only movie I've ever walked out of was The Informant!, another self-indulgent dreck flick, and I would have been glad to add The American to that list.
I know movies like Transformers 2 suck. But at least something happened in that movie. This one? There's more plot development in a bloody documentary. By the time the movie was done, I wanted something a bit more exciting. So I mixed in some regular coffee in with the decaf. My GOD was that exhilarating after watching The American.
