watch The Adjustment Bureau, which was adapted from Dick's short story "The Adjustment Team." I was, I am afraid to admit, underwhelmed. Which is a bad sign. This movie had all of the makings of a great film. It had fantastic source material. It had an outstanding cast. The leads had class and sex appeal and chemistry and a great meet-cute. It had shadowy-men-in-black. What it did not have, unfortunately, was a screen play that could carry it all through a full-length motion picture. Instead, it relied on interminable chase scenes. Yes, our hero and heroine are running away from the eponymous adjustment bureau, but come on! How many scenes do we need of them running down the street? Through a door? Up the stairs? Through another door? Along the corridor? Through yet another door? Around the corner? Through - wait for it - yet another door? Are you starting to get tired of this already? So was I. Oh, and did I mention that they go through doors? Yeah, they do that. Doors. Lots of `em.Let me throw you the plot so you know where I'm going here. David Norris (Matt Damon) is just
about to win a seat in the US Senate. Then he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) in a men's room. Sparks definitely fly. This is the real thing. They both know it. But, enter the shadowy-men-in-black who do everything in their power to prevent David and Elise from getting together. At least, most of the shadowy-men-in-black do. One of the shadowy-men-in-black (Anthony Mackie) is not so shadowy after all. He kind of runs interference for them. Tells them who they're up against. Shows them the doors. (Oh yeah, you knew they'd be back.) Once everything was established and I was all ready to hunker down with my bucket o' popcorn and gallon o' soda for a bit of good, suspenseful repartee with the shadowy-men-in-black, the film devolved into a rather insipid version of Running Man...with lots of doors. Yeah, cuz the doors let you move around sort of behind the scenes, between the space of reality as it were. Unfortunately, the film doesn't show you any of the space between the space. Instead, we just see our plucky hero and heroine enter a door in one place and - jump cut - exit a door someplace else. Not much to work with there. Th
en the whole thing ends so abruptly that I almost cracked a tooth on the rim of my soda cup.In the pantheon of films made from P.K. Dick stories, The Adjustment Bureau ranks pretty near the bottom. Even the 1995 film Screamers had more on the ball that this one does. And as I said before, that's really too bad, because all of the right elements are there. It just needed a better screenplay, one that was a little more fleshed out, maybe a bit more philosophical, maybe one that actually had something worth saying in the end.
The Adjustment Bureau is rated PG-13 and has a runtime of 106 minutes, which is a long time to watch two people running.
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