Protecting The Private Life

Contrived, cliché, and uses “magic” as a free pass to fill the movie with ridiculous plot holes. CGI is constantly used instead of real illusions, losing all credibility and sense of magic. There’s some clever one-liners and cool action scenes every so often, but they’re few and far between. It’s a movie about magic without actually having any magic of its own. Unless you’re after some extremely light entertainment, just go and re-watch The Prestige. 4/10

I am so sick of shaky cameras. After being blown away by District 9, it was shocking to see Neill Blomkamp stoop to such lazy filming. None of the fight scenes were fresh or engaging, and the camera only stood still long enough each fight to show off some new gadget before going back to indiscriminate blurs of punches or guns firing. Everything was just so derivative and ordinary. Occasionally you’d see a cool camera angle, a clever use of silence or a particularly nice special effect, just to let you know there was at least some creative spark left. However these were few and far between and were nowhere near enough to salvage the movie. Blomkamp showed us in District 9 that he likes to commentate on society, and he did an excellent job of handling discrimination in that movie. In this movie, however, whatever commentary he might have originally had clearly got lost in the process. While the first quarter of the movie has some nice scenes of Matt Damon living in slums and dealing w