Well, I don't like beginning a review by mentioning other reviews, but I must say, I'm perplexed. Richard Roeper called this film "an instant masterpiece -- a movie I know will stay with me for the rest of my life", and it is easily the most acclaimed film of the year on Rotten Tomatoes, and, I just don't see it. I mean, the film was a fairly-well plotted character drama plotted around a 'heist' plot, but it's fairly mundane and samey, and involves a weak, bloody finale and an important character getting dropped and forgotten for no apparent reason...
It deals with a janitor at a bank who was formerly a star high school hockey player and got into an accident that killed his girlfriend and a couple other friends, and now he has a memory problem (although nowhere near as harsh as Leonard Shelby's; he just has trouble sequencing memories), and he gets caught up in a bank robbery by a charismatic stranger who claims to know him (and the beautiful Isla Fisher doesn't hurt the convincing process either)
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is consistently one of the better actors of his generation, and is rewarded with critical acclaim and complete ignorance by the general public; Matthew Goode was fantastic, especially considering I've seen him before in Match Point (and could so hardly recognize him that I had to look at pictures of him from both films...amazing), who exudes an air of charm and menace almost simultaneously, and had a better American accent than most of the AMERICAN cast; Isla Fisher and Jeff Bridges do their jobs (be cute; provided comic relief), although they're mostly superfluous...
The film plods along basically how you would imagine a job about a meek guy convinced to do a bank heist would be, and then turns random near the end, to its defecit.
I give it a 7.5 and put it at #6 in my Eight of 2007.
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