The thing is, I really like the people involved with this thing. And I don't necessarily think any of them did a bad job. Just, somehow, the basic premise was flawed from the start and nothing could really get going from there. At every turn it felt as though the script just copped out.
Relatively good performances by the three leads (Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, and Oscar Isaac), not terrible direction by Hossein Amini, and pretty good camera work seemed desperately overshadowed by a general lack of planning on the part of... well Hossein Amini sort of shot himself in the foot by writing this script for himself to direct. And his choice of locations generally felt unfulfilling and distracting to everything else in the story. I could never tell where the characters were at any given time. So maybe it does fall on direction...
And I suppose this is a more flawed film than I initially wanted to let on. But it's the little mistakes here and there that could easily have been fixed to make a solid Third Man type of flick. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it feels less like that wonderful piece of cinema, and more like a compilation of weird cellphone pictures from a rather disjointed vacation with a few celebrities in them.
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