Not quite sure what I make of this film. It's flagged as Bourne Identity meets Inception which immediately smacks of desperate marketing but there was stuff in it I liked.
It's about a young and upcoming politician David Norris (Matt Damon) who meets a dancer Elise (Emily Blunt) with whom there is an instant attraction.
From there on in powers beyond David's control seem to be keeping the two of them apart - the adjustment bureau. It's essentially a group of men in suits and trilbies who travel about by opening some sort of portal in ordinary doors and make things happen so that the two lovers blossoming relationship is thwarted - David losing her telephone number, changing the location of a rehearsal, that sort of thing.
But David won't give up and the Bureau eventually has to reveal to him what they've been doing and threaten him if he persists, that it is not his 'fate' to be with Elise.
OK so where does the Inception bit come in? Well, you could argue that there are parallels lives - the bureau controlling what does and doesn't happen and tinkering with people's minds. And the Bourne connection? Well there is a great chase sequence at the end as the two lovers try to outrun the Bureau.
The problem is that it isn't clever enough to be Inception and Matt Damon running around the streets of New York doesn't make it Bourne.
What I liked about it was the central story of two people in love being kept apart, it is compelling and you do get right behind them. Everything else just seemed overly contrived. The Bureau, it is heavily hinted at, is all God's doing which I found unsatisfying and a little bit of a fudge.
So based on that I'm going to give it 56%. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a rating of 71% based on 198 reviews which I'm slightly surprised about. The average user rating is also high at 70%. On Metacritic it gets 62% based on 41 reviews with an average user rating of 6.2/10.
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