The Adjustment Bureau

You're not leaving this room until you sign onto "The Bourne Legacy"

Grade: B

Director: George Nolfi

Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slatterly, and Terence Stamp

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

The Adjustment Bureau ultimately isn’t a Matrix-esque sci-fi thriller or some metaphysical foray into the eternal questions of free will and fate.

Sure, there are heady issues bandied about in this loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story, “Adjustment Team,” in which an unseen, omnipotent, and conspicuously ecumenical “Chairman” dispatches his band of “adjusters” to steer the course of human events.

Clad in Mad Men attire, these angels of fate do not control human thoughts or actions – although they are able to wipe a person’s memory – but can influence external events in order to obtain a predetermined outcome. For example, they cannot force someone crash their car into another, but they can alter a traffic control signal at the moment your vehicle is entering an intersection.

Instead, writer-director George Nolfi constructs a giant hamster maze designed to test the lengths two crazy kids will go to find true love. David Norris (Matt Damon) is a charismatic Congressman seemingly destined for political stardom. In the midst of an unexpected election night defeat, David has a random but memorable encounter with Elise (Emily Blunt), a beguiling beauty and aspiring dancer.

It turns out the Chairman and his bureau – including Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slatterly) – has future plans for David and they do not include Elise. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game between David’s compulsion to be with Elise and the efforts by higher authority to keep them apart.

Plot holes abound, even discounting the script’s science-fiction context. No reasonable explanation is given for why this league of extrasensory gentlemen can perceive human emotions but not thoughts, or how they know where all of mankind is and will be at all times but somehow keep losing track of David and Elise whenever they enter each other’s orbit.

That said, there’s a witty, charming Ernst Lubitsch touch applied to much of The Adjustment Bureau – memories of Heaven Can Wait spring to mind. It nicely partners with the palpable chemistry between Damon and Blunt, two able, handsome actors who entice us into caring about their characters.

Alas, Nolfi – and perhaps studio “adjusters” – don’t trust the strength of their material. Matters take a revealing, but dark turn when a taciturn, troubleshooting adjuster named Thompson (Terence Stamp) arrives on the scene. Time and again the filmmakers try to amp up the script with chase sequences - filmed on location in Manhattan – involving cars, doorway portals, and a stairway to nowhere except a finale that feels suspiciously like the product of test-audience pandering. The mixing of styles and genres is Nolfi’s stated intent, but his execution creates tonal inconsistencies that keep the viewer constantly off-kilter.

Fortunately, it’s the rapport between Damon – ever the likeable Everyman – and Blunt that determines Adjustment Bureau’s fate. In particular, this is Blunt’s best performance since her early work in My Summer of Love and, later, The Devil Wears Prada. Here, she is mischievous, vulnerable, and always fetching. And, scenes of Elise’s modern dance routines made me envision another alternate reality: one where Blunt was cast as the Black Swan.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://goo.gl/unU3H

Valkyrie

Pirates of the Aryan

Grade: B

Director: Bryan Singer

Starring: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, Kevin McNally, and Christian Berkel

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours

In war, the difference between courage and treachery often lies along the dividing line between victory and defeat. Substitute a triumph by the Confederacy during the American Civil War and history books would treat the acts of John Wilkes Booth and his cadre of co-conspirators to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and topple the upper rungs of the U.S. government as daring blows for liberty landed against a tyrannical foe.

That Adolph Hitler was a ruthless, murderous madman is beyond dispute. Yet, he also inspired millions of Germans as their leader and marched them into worldwide war. In Valkyrie, director Bryan Singer assumes that audiences will automatically embrace the virtue behind the true story of a group of German soldiers who carried out a plan to kill Hitler and topple the Schutzstaffel during “July 20 plot” of 1944. Branded as traitors at the time, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators are memorialized today as heroes, in Germany and abroad.

Yet, while the righteousness of their purpose seems obvious in retrospect, the path of how political and military leaders who swore an allegiance to their country and its Führer came to rebel against them deserves more than a passing presumption. Instead, Singer – directing his third foray into Nazi subject-matter (Apt Pupil and the X-Men prologue) – drops us squarely into the plot’s planning stages, eschewing any examination of the plotters’ motives, including, for example, the belief by some in the old guard that, with Hitler gone, Germany could join with the Western allies to stem the Bolshevik tide sweeping in from the Soviet Union.

Already harboring doubts about Hitler, Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) loses a hand, two fingers, and his left eye on the battlefields of North Africa. Afterwards, he takes a series of posts in Berlin that position him closer to Hitler in preparation for the assassination attempt. From there, Singer delves into the cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the plot’s planning and execution, from developing the means and opportunity to kill Hitler to insuring the coup d’état’s success during the chaotic aftermath.

Illustrating the procedural aspects of the plot is where Valkyrie shines, thanks to Singer’s finely tuned pacing and lavish production values. Much of the filming took place on location in Germany, including rare permission from the government to shoot at the Bendlerblock, a historic locale crucial to the story. Even Tom Cruise’s ill-fitting American accent, the subject of much preproduction press, gets forgotten amid the actor’s trademark intensity and a coterie of British actors – Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Kevin McNally, and Tom Wilkinson – giving their crisp, buttoned-up best in key supporting roles.

What’s missing, however, is sufficient motive for these stolid, conservative officers to break so radically with military tradition; such a ‘why’ would compliment Singer’s glossy rendering the plot’s intricate ‘how.’ Still, Valkyrie maintains its momentum without feeling rushed, and the story remains taut despite its foregone outcome.

Neil Morris

Yes Man

We're too late - Sarah Palin's already been here.

Grade: C +

Director: Peyton Reed

Starring: Jim Carrey, Zooey Deschanel, Bradley Cooper, Rhys Darby, Molly Sims, and Terence Stamp

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 44 minutes

In Liar Liar, Jim Carrey played an unpleasant chronic fibber forced by mystical powers to start always telling the truth. Eleven years later (!) in Yes Man, Carrey plays an unpleasant naysayer forced by a mystical self-help guru (Terence Stamp, also reprising a previous role from Bowfinger) to always say “yes” to everything in order to turn his frown upside down.

Unfortunately, Yes Man feels less like a triumphant return to Carrey’s movie comedy roots than a nostalgic pratfall down memory lane. Now 46-years-old, Carrey’s spasmodic zaniness has lost its freshness and utility. Every time Carrey contorts his face into a rubbery visage, whether to express romantic nervousness or approximate the body’s reaction to a Red Bull overdose, it feels like a desperate attempt to buttress scenes with little underlying comedic foundation.

As a result of his affirmative reactions, Carrey’s Carl Allen gets promoted at his humdrum job as a L.A. bank loan officer and meets-cute a quirky gal named Allison (Zooey Deschanel). How do we know Allison is quirky? Well, she wears a scooter helmet with eyes painted in them, she organizes a morning jogging photography club, and she sings lead for alt rock band named “Munchausen by Proxy.” Oh, and she’s played by Zooey Deschanel.

For his part, Carl also discovers the sunny side of attending Harry Potter theme parties, flying to Lincoln, Nebraska on a whim, and oral sex from his elderly neighbor. As inane as the idea that a person would impulsively be willing to agree to anything – starting with giving a homeless person a ride in his car and all the money in his wallet – is that, somewhere along the way, Yes Man morphs from trumpeting the hidden benefits of being agreeable to a unnecessary knockoff of Pay It Forward.

Raleigh-born director Peyton Reed (The Break Up; Down with Love) frames an already rickety script with flat, labored direction. Yes Man has its moments, foremost among them Carl’s Third Eye Blind serenade to coax a suicide jumper (Luis Guzman) off a building’s ledge. On the other hand, a sidebar in which Carl is suspected of being a domestic terrorist is just plain dumb. Before you feel compelled to “just say yes,” make sure to first say “no” to Yes Man.

Neil Morris