An average movie

At the beginning of the 90's, after directing movies for already 20 years, Clint Eastwood finally emerged as a major director thanks to the deserved massive critical success of 'Unforgiven'. Later on, Eastwood would have a string of disappointing features ('Absolute Power', 'True Crime', 'Space Cowboys', 'Blood Work') and, from this string, this movie was the only one which had the potential to be really good. Indeed, there was a pretty good buzz about it before its release, the story was really intriguing and there was a pretty strong cast (John Cusack, Kevin Spacey, Jude Law). Unfortunately, even though it wasn't a complete disaster, the whole thing turned out to be a misfire. Indeed, it is one of those few times where the subject seemed to go way over Eastwood’s head (‘J. Edgar’ was actually another example). Basically, he gave us some rather complex conflicted sometimes even weird characters but he had apparently no clue what to do with them and the end-result was just rather underwhelming. Eventually, it was not a bad movie, far from it, the actors involved were fine and there was something really intriguing about the story but unfortunately it never fulfilled its great potential. I still think it is worth a look though.

6/10