American Dream

Only 10 for nick stahls performance. I enjoyed the movie, but I went into thinking it was gonna be as bad as what I herd about it. Pleasantly surprised it was better than I thought.

Pair his cringe acting with the first time director, Janusz Kaminski and it's no surprise this is terrible. Loads of plot holes, people loaning nearly a million dollars on a handshake deal and then balking at a 7k finders fee.

Then add in pointless flashbacks and scenes of the guys running around town on skateboards and it's just a bizarre film all the way through.

If a film is rated 1 or 2 stars, then not only is it bad, it shouldn't have been made in the first place and that's exactly what this is.

The acting wasn't bad. The story needed improvement. People want to see the underdog succeed. Build up the suspense, but have an outcome the audience can be content with. Take lessons from The Equalizer. So disappointed.

Not sure why, but I wanted to like this movie. Starts off decently although no one is winning any acting awards for this one

But once the premise is set up, the whole structure falls apart and the story strains credulity. You end up loosing all respect for the protagonists because the react so stupidly as the movie descends into the farcical. Kind of a shame really.

In the end, it's a dud.

A small waste of time but still a waste. "American Dream" never gets close to the dream, it only shows the nightmarish way hard-working people have to go through in order to built something valuable and iomportant in their lives, in this case two friends (Michiel Huisman and Luke Bracey) who have to make a business with the Russian mob and the bad guy played by Nick Stahl in order to have their project working. Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kaminski signs this as a director and producer, and what a disjointed wreck this is. I wonder what happened to him in opting for making this - and it gets weirder that the film took ten years to finally get a release.

While the actors are all enjoyable and good to watch (specially Stahl as he always delivers good villains, "Bully" and "Sin City" to mention a few), but the inconsistent, dumb and painful screenplay doesn't help anyway in coming up with something memorable or worth seeing. The two friends and their girlfriends go through a lenghty and violent scenario where Stahl gives them a time to collect his money on a certain deadline but instead of waiting for it he and his henchmen keep on threatning them every hour. He's worst than a bank calling every ten minutes wanting to know if the debt was paid or when.

And was there a point in opening the film with a tough situation by one of the women back in Russia, to later on return to that scenario in the middlwe of the movie, explain what the situation ended and still we don't get any resolution? I figured out it was a way to say that the girlfriends (one of them, at least) were far more brave and cold-blooded than those good-looking wimpy guys.

It's heavily cliched, annoying and jumpy, has been done before and better. 4/10.