Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Matt Damon
Emily Blunt
John Slattery
"The Amazing" Terence Stamp
Jon Turner
Directed By:
George Nolfi
This movie has very little to do with the Philip K. Dick short story it is based on. You know the Hollywood saying "loosely based on"? This is a textbook case. In fact, I think the studio used Dick's name to deliberately to promote the movie first and foremost. There is an evident conceptual resemblance with "The Adjustment Team", but George Nolfi's film is simply another story told with the same problematic. A team of "world regulators" named "The Adjustment Bureau" are responsible for keeping people on path with "the plan" that's been set for them. Nobody knows their existence, but they are there. They make you forget your keys, spill your coffee and bump your toes, so that your life goes as they planned. But since they are only humans with special hats, they are prone to mistakes just like everybody else. When the stakes are high, it's also very probable that somebody drops the ball. And they did.
The Bureau had this very special client named David Norris (Damon), a politician who they are keeping under tight surveillance. But one of the Bureau's elements named Harry (Anthony Mackie) falls asleep on the job (apparently because he suffers from existential fatigue) and Norris is walking away from the plan. Of course, it's all because of a woman. David met Elise (Emily Blunt) in the male bathroom after a crippling defeat during his run for New York Senate. She inspires him to do the most genuine, populist speech and his popularity skyrockets in the polls. That was all part of the plan. What wasn't, was that he would meet Elise again, a woman who could satisfy his needs and quench his thirst for political success. But he does because some guy was sleeping on the job. And David will risk everything for the love of his life, because he has found someone worth fighting for.
Yeah, I know. Corny. Fortunately, the love story between David and Elise (who falls prey to every cliché in the genre) kind of takes the back seat. The confrontation in between David and the superbly cast members of the Bureau makes the bulk of the movie. John Slattery (Mad Men's Roger Sterling) and the legendary badass Terence Stamp are doing an amazing job at being terrifying bureaucrats. This part is very faithful to the philosophical principles behind Philip K. Dick's writing, about life being the illusion of free will and a constant battle in between self-determination and a giant, faceless formatting machine. There is the mandatory hilarious Philip-K-Dick-goes-to-the-movies scene where Matt Damon runs away from a team of unidentified men, dressed in black, through a series of office. I laughed out loud and nobody in the living room knew why, but watch other movies based on a PKD story (except maybe Bladerunner, who was done exceptionally well) and they all have a scene like this. It embodies the paranoia in his writing.
Since George Nolfi drifted so far away from Philip K. Dick's story (who packed way more of a visual style) and opted for a minimalist approach to his supernatural moments (a series of doors that bend the space-time continuum, coincidences happening when the Bureau members are around), it's hard not to compare it to movies like Inception, who played much on scene structure and symbolism. And that's where The Adjustment Bureau falls a little short. It's so far from Philip K. Dick's original story that it's borrowing so many ideas that the original content feels a little loss. The distribution is strong and the overall philosophy is following Philip K. Dick's ideas, but The Adjustment Bureau is a movie that is lost in Hollywood. It doesn't have a strong identity and it's falling for clichés more often than not. Interesting viewing for the fans of Philip K. Dick (like me), but you won't be aching for many more viewings. I don't see The Adjustment Bureau being added to many DVD/Blu-Ray collections in a near future.
SCORE: 71%