The Blah Shepherd

Sheesh. This movie was so boring I could not even finish it. That rarely happens to me. I am usually determined to finish what I start, and hoping like the foolish optimist that I am that things are going to come together, make sense, and deliver a kick of an ending.

But I gave one hour of my life to The Good Shepherd, and as much as I love Matt Damon and his supporting, high-profile cast mates, I could not keep going. I just didn't care what happened to Edward (Damon's character), let alone any of the other characters, whom I couldn't even name.

I haven't read the reviews, but I'm assuming that more than one reviewer has already suggested that this movie desperately needed a giant pair of scissors in the editing room.

Here's the story, as I understand it: Edward, a humor-impaired Ivy-Leaguer, dated a deaf girl but accidentally got the slutty sister of a colleague/classmate (Angelina Jolie) pregnant. Meanwhile, he's been recruited by the new Spy Department, and one week after his shotgun wedding gets sent to London to do some spying.

Clips from JFK speeches about the Cuban Missile Crisis are dropped in at random intervals. At the one-hour mark, Edward betrays his teacher, whose crime seems to be liking men, and watches from a distance as a band of thugs messes him up and dumps him in his watery grave. The music was ominous and foreboding enough for my family to ask me to turn it down, but as I was feeling nothing but boredom, I just turned it off.

I have a lot of tolerance for things that don't make sense until the very end (i.e., the novel Life of Pi), but it's at least got to hold my attention along the way. The Good Shepherd did not meet this basic criterion.