An average movie

When I heard that Sean Penn was finally coming back with a new directing effort, almost 10 long years after the amazing 'Into the Wild', obviously, I became quite excited. However, when it was released, it turned out to be a huge critical flop but I still wanted to check it out anyway. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the damned thing really deserved its poor reputation. Seriously, pretty much nothing worked in this movie. Indeed, first of all, they made the usual mistake of dealing with Africa and yet still only focusing on 2 Western characters. I mean, except for one doctor with a very small part, the Africans were only limited to either helpless victims or monstrous psychopaths with barely any dialogue whatsoever. Then, the directing was also surprisingly weak and also terribly pretentious. I mean, they criticized the whole Western world for not caring but they still managed to waste more than half the running time with a completely generic love story involving two white doctors. At least, Javier Bardem was a very good choice as he was charismatic without being too handsome and he did what he could with this material. I wish I could say the same for Charlize Theron who was as usual insanely gorgeous but her good looks actually worked against her and, to make things worse, she gave here one of her weakest performances ever. To conclude, I think I'm being rather generous with my rating here but I gave it a few extra points because it was dealing with something important but there is no doubt that the whole thing was terribly weak and disappointing. 

5/10