Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Simply Perfect

One of my all time favorites.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The story sounds good and full of promise. Somebody in the CIA leaked the Bay of Pigs plans to Castro. I'm in! That should easily fill 90 mintutes. Instead, it's just a series of random flashbacks about Edward. I wish it had stuck to the story. Oh well

This is a staring contest. Someone asks Matt Damon's character and he stares off into space. Too many changes of dates and a very confused story line. This movie is about something but exactly what eludes me. The Whiffenpoofs are seen in some musical presentations but no good show of their talent is to be found here. The old cars look nice. Matt is supposed to age more than twenty years but that doesn't happen at all.This is not an entertaining film in my opinion. Lots of people here did like it. The one very good scene I recommend watching is the parachute scene near the end. How did they do that? My guess is the stunt is what cost the $90 million.

Very loosely based on the life of the CIA Head of Counterintelligence during the 1960s, this drama looks at the early years of the agency and its difficulties with the Bay of Pigs. The structure is quite innovative with the film flipping back and forth between the World War II years and the 1960s as the protagonist, played by Matt Damon, is haunted by memories of past failures after being accused of an intelligence leak. Engaging as all this sounds, the film is oddly hard to get through. The lack of makeup to age Damon is the most obvious vice; the story is impossible to follow at times with it unclear whether certain scenes are taking place in the 1940s or 1960s. Then there is the absence of any passage of time between Damon's son as a preteen and adult (Eddie Redmayne is great in the role though). The film's biggest setback though is the fact that Damon's character is cold, reserved and uncharismatic throughout. With his constant poor choices in life, he becomes an incredibly hard person to like. He is not just flawed but almost without virtue. That said, his extreme willingness to put his work/country ahead of his family is certainly curious and the overall film offers a fascinating portrait of individuals doing morally ambiguous things in the name of protecting their country - the most memorable of which is using LSD in an interrogation (with obvious results). Add in a solid supporting turn from Tammy Blanchard, and 'The Good Shepherd' certainly has a number of things going in its favour, but one's mileage is likely to vary based on patience and interest in the subject matter.

A fictionalization of the origins of the CIA, DeNiro's second film behind the camera tells the story of Edward Wilson (Damon) who goes from university lad to civil servant to one of the founders of the CIA, which gets its baptism of fire in the heated political climate of the 1960s as it battles the threat of Communism. Of course, the paranoia and intrigue soon envelop Wilson's existence.Well filmed but less substantial and much slower than it ought to be. 'Good Shepherd' is a great idea, discussing the origins of the CIA, that is ultimately too dragged out and not incisive enough to make it stick. The political intrigue never feels engrossing enough, the tension never consistently palpable enough, the sense of how Wilson's work affects the outer world never feeling present enough. In fact, half of the film is basically a biopic about Wilson, charting his youth and civil service days, as well as his courting and marriage to Jolie's character (this a film that clocks in at over two and a half hours, may I remind you), and though not poorly written, it wears out its welcome well before we get to any secret service business. This is a real slow burner, which not always a bad thing, but here, the pacing sags a lot because of all this perfunctory material that could've been condensed to a few flashbacks or even a vignette, instead of getting to the LeCarre style spy intrigue, which is when the film does pick up, but I really question if Eric Roth's script needed to be this bulky with material.On the plus side, DeNiro is a very strong director, with some really tense sequences and intrigue in that second half, as well as a very shadowy, almost sepia aesthetic to the film which enhances that sort of 'secret archive footage' look that fits a spy tale rather well. And well, with someone like DeNiro in charge, it goes without saying he roped in a bunch of strong performers, on top of a very restrained Damon, including the likes of Alec Baldwin, Bill Hurt, John Tuturro, Michael Gambon, Joe Pesci and Timothy Hutton. This wasn't a film made with slack, but it seems like the prestige came before the substance. Well performed and mounted, and not without ambition or merits, there is simply no denying where it fell down, and that makes 'Good Shepherd' a noble but still, nonetheless, disappointment all the same.