RandomViewer

This is not a movie.

It is the most stunningly awful, irritating piece of crap you will ever witness.

Do not put yourself through the anger and dismay you will feel as you watch all of several minutes before you turn off this sublimely stupid and ridiculous waste of time that masquerades as "art".

The emotion will overcome you. It will not seem enough to merely throw the DVD in the bin, or to lunge for the mouse in order to hit the delete button, oh no; you will want to put your foot through that 50-inch plasma, or angrily instruct your partner to fetch the car keys and the gopro so you can reverse over that expensive macbook and have a record of doing it.

I'm a pretty easy-going guy but after seeing this movie I now hate all French people, providing as they did the culture that spawned this imbecilic nonsense. And not only that, I'm now angry with the European Union as a whole, for standing by and allowing French people to believe that a culture that can spawn such a woeful, self-indulgent mess is somehow acceptable in this day and age.

With every passing minute that the camera is directed to gaze lovingly upon a fully grown man playing stupid dress-ups for absolutely no reason whatsoever, you will find the worst aspects of your whole life passing before your eyes; every moment you wasted flicking through TV channels, and every hour spent mindlessly clicking through inconsequential garbage on the internet. All of this is rapidly focused in one fell swoop with the realization that your life has led to this one moment in time when the rational part of your being- if you possess one- finally cries out that enough is enough.

You will understand why it is that not even Europeans like European films. You will accept without question the wisdom of blithely ignoring any movie with subtitles. You will fall on your knees and weep in dismay at all the times you mocked Hollywood, at what you had previously asserted was blind consumerism, and you will beg for forgiveness. You will realize that it was you who had been the fool all along, sticking your nose up snootily at the likes of Michael Bay and Tom Cruise, and ignorantly writing off any film that had a tie-in with McDonalds Happy Meals. Because now you have seen just how truly dismal a film can be.

An overlong movie that has no reason to be overlong.

Or ever being made.

It is mind-numbingly boring; "it's got Jason Segal in it" makes you watch it, hoping it gets good except it is so. effing. boring.

And the producers never asked anyone about how irritating the London accent (or whatever it was) on the girl was. Every time she talked it was like Paris Hilton trying to be the most irritating English person ever, and she did it well.

There was about 7 minutes 30 seconds of good stuff in this movie. Segal ought to be ashamed of himself.

That this movie was (reportedly) made for $12 million is a wake-up call for Hollywood; to achieve what it does on this budget shames the entire industry. It is a remarkably fresh take on the superhero genre made by someone who understands that many people under 40 are getting better stories -and a sense of wonder- from the best video games, rather than movies.

The special effects are astoundingly good, and, for once, are at the service of the story; sparingly where necessary, before building up to a stunning climax in the last third. They were not only more effective and superior than what is usually seen in a $150M production, they were used in a smarter and more convincing fashion.

The tempo of the story is managed perfectly over the 90-odd minutes, and some of the actors involved would seem to have a big future. The black dude has the charisma of a Denzel Washington; he, the cousin and the filmmaker/girlfriend all complete their roles perfectly, without any of the self-aware over-acting prevalent in most studio movies these days.

The only negative for me was a big one; I nearly turned it off after the first ten minutes due to the fact that the lead character was possibly the most whiny, wet and irritating I have ever seen in a film. It wasn't that he stood out more due to the higher standards being set everywhere else, because I was ready to turn it off before knowing how good the rest of the movie would turn out to be.

I get it that a huge part of the movie was the contrast provided when a powerless, submissive protagonist gains extraordinary power, yet even the most determinedly unsympathetic anti-heroes pale in comparison to this guy. As the victim of many circumstances out of his control, even when he turned evil I felt like there should have been at least some stage where I gave a sh*t but this never happened. Much of this has to do with how the character was written, yet I think literally any other actor playing that character would have made for a better film.

I don't know the history of the director, the cinematographer or the writers of the script; if they are all unknowns then what they achieved here is even more impressive. As of late, only Christopher Nolan puts together something this polished, this assured....with 20 times the budget.