Inception review by Tim Hayes

Mr. Hayes is not only the ALMT publicist and lead editor,
but also contributes film journalism and reviews to Critic’s Notebook and Cinemattraction.

Tim Hayes on Theatrical Thursdays

Inception dir. Christopher Nolan

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
Screenwriter: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Michael Caine
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action throughout)
Official Website: Inceptionmovie.com

(Spoilers are inevitable. Whatever happens in the next 400 words or so, you should watch “Inception”. See you in the comments.)

With big films still lashed to superheroes and video games, “Inception” spends a few hundred million bucks gazing in a different direction, towards 1970s heist movies and 1960s super-spies, and cool guys with sharp suits and guilty secrets. Just when movies are queueing up to dig deeper into Jack Kirby’s imagination, “Inception” is more interested in Jim Steranko and kudos to it for that.

If we get into the plot we’ll still be here in 4000 words, but you’ve heard the gist: Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) assembles a team to go into the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and plant an idea in his skull, a plan that ends up involving dreams within dreams within dreams. Already dangerous enough, the enterprise is at risk from Dom’s own subconscious and especially the shade of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who crops up without warning and seems anything but stable.

The bad news is that the film has problems and they’re not chicken feed. Show-don’t-Tell is out of fashion, but “Inception”‘s wish to over-explain is a bit nuts. It’s nothing but Tell for 140 minutes of non-stop exposition, and heavy-handed with it. Its dreams are the least dream-like dreams ever, not just because they’re strictly direct A-to-B affairs, but because they’re all filled with the sound of people explaining stuff to each other. Compared to the night-terrors of “Mulholland Drive”, “Inception” is a cartoon doodled in a dream diary.

But quite a cartoon. Christopher Nolan’s cunning plan is to forget about the philosophy lesson and create a plausible way for four or five different Saturday-night movies to come in the same wrapper and play all at once. It’s an audacious trick, the kind only someone with a love of the popcorn stuff would try. Only a writer with the hours clocked up in the dark would build the opening sequence, and have Marion Cotillard stalk across a collapsing dreamscape like the most fatale femme in this or any other cosmos.

Somewhere between the Jason Bourne dream and the James Bond dream, “Inception” shrugs and decides it just wants to be a slice of big dumb fun – you may or may not find this to be a let-down. The good news is that the level between the Bourne and the Bond is occupied by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s solo mission, a thing of wonder. The film’s dodgy logic has sprung a leak by then, but in return you get a punch-up in a hotel built by MC Escher and some business with five bodies lashed together in zero gravity which really is nightmarish. Finally in a position to scene-steal in the mainstream, JGL pockets the whole thing while fighting upside down on the ceiling and plummeting down a lift shaft.

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