Inception – 4

An attempt at mind-bending with convoluted plot and visual pyrotechnics, Inception winds up a silly movie that makes no sense on any of its purported four levels. While that is not unusual in Holllywood films today and could be somewhat forgiven if the acting were enjoyable, Christopher Nolan’s movie also suffers from horrid miscasting and bad performances all around. Leonardo DiCaprio, indistinguishable from his role in Shutter Island remains a mysterious movie star to me: he poses rather than acts and conveys no depth in the only character that even purports to be a character. The others are unengaging cardboard cutouts. How did the foreign Marian Cotillard get to be Cobb’s wife? How did Ellen Page, who seems to have wandered in from some different Hollywood universe, get to be a spatial-design genius? Is there supposed to be chemistry between her and one of the male leads? Michael Caine gets to be Michael Caine. Etc. The dialogue, instead of developing personalities or engendering emotions, is strictly used to explain the plot’s alternate universe, and it sounds more like an instructional manual than real people talking. And for action scenes, Nolan falls back on my pet peeve of action movies: dozens of bad guys, all professional killers, spray machine gun fire at our heroes and hit no one, while the good guys, who are chemists, businessmen, architects and visionaries, use pistols and rifles and never seem to miss. And does it bother anyone else that half the time the Japanese character is called “Say-toe” and the other half “Sigh-toe”?