Tagline: Fight for your fate.
Curiosity: My fiancée has a crush on Emily Blunt.
Plot: A mysterious shadow agency tries to stop Matt Damon from fucking Emily Blunt.
Thoughts: It makes me feel good to know that my fiancée occasionally picks shitty movies too. She might question my taste and sanity, but she’s picked some clunkers just like me. The Adjustment Bureau is one of those clunkers. An adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, the film’s sole saving grace is the chemistry between leads Damon and Blunt, by which I mean I could see Damon legitimately wanting to hump Blunt. The two show real fireworks, and I’m honestly not sure who’s more charming.
But the movie that’s built around them is lame-o. A secret organization called the Adjustment Bureau uses a guide for planning out all of civilization. While humans can control small decisions, like what to watch on TV, the big choices – who to marry, where to work – are handled by the Bureau. Free will, when it matters, does not exist in this society. And that’s a cool Orwellian sort of idea, except that it doesn’t add up to much here. For Damon, the tagline of fighting for one’s fate adds up to trying to get naked time with Blunt. That’s it.
Granted, the Adjustment Bureau doesn’t come off as nefarious, so it’s not like Damon’s character has much inkling to rage against the machine (That would probably reek too much of The Matrix anyway. Or maybe Robot Holocaust?). But the resulting plot of obtaining sloppy make-outs feels too small. The Bureau, in turn, feels too vaguely defined to build tension. They start off slightly intimidating, until you realize they’re a sci-fi riff on Judeo-Christian ideology. But I just didn’t feel like there was much at stake. The film also breaks an important science fiction rule: Never double up suspension of disbelief. I can accept that there’s a group who secretly controls the world. But they’re given a weakness near the end of the film that exists simply to create a happy ending. It smacks of bad writing.
Reflection: Emily Blunt does seem pretty cool though.
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