"Promised Land" is like a story written by a committee working in separate rooms. They each have a decent segment of the story, but none of them seem to have the task of welding the total project together. There is a cute romance, but nothing comes of it. There is a theme of political corruption, but nothing comes of it. I was going to repeat this theme of unfinished plots, but unlike the movie makers, I realize this would become pointless and boring, so I will do what they should have done and quit listing the failures of this story.
87 year old Hal Holbrook steals the show with two great scenes that lay out the details of this story of a poor town which must decide to hold on to their farms in a bad economy or sell drilling rights to a gas company that is rumored to spoil the environment with their
reckless approach to finding gas deposits deep under the soil.
I generally like Matt Damon in all his films; I trust him to give an
honest performance and have a worthy theme to his stories. This time there is no passion in a story that really needed more emotion.
The producers may have been trying to be fair to both sides, but they ended up with a story that just does not make the audience care and that is the death knell for a film such as this.
I feel I have to quote a colleague who is quick to advise the public to "catch this one on television."
No comments:
Post a Comment