The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Rating: 0h stars

A man who ages backwards (Brad Pitt) has Adventures with a capital ZZZ.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
2008 · PG-13 · Drama
Reviewed June 5, 2009

It's an old saying (in my head, where I just said it for the first time) that bad movies are more fun to review than good ones. Well, the hell with that saying, because it was that saying that forced me to sit through all three friggin' hours of this goddamn film just so I could confirm the suspicions I had in the first five minutes: this film blows. It is all clichés and sappy voice-over narration and much-lauded CGI that reminded me, and painfully so, of the badly-rendered vampires in I Am Legend. The interminable first half of the film is a determinedly picaresque (but woefully slow-moving) adventure filled with colorful characters and whimsical motifs — to update a phrase from Dorothy Parker, tonstant viewwer fwow up. The second half manages to pull itself together and stick to one storyline, but unfortunately by that time I'd developed a strong dislike for all the characters and didn't give a hummingbird's ass what happened to any of them. There's a brief bit at the very end that almost — almost — captures the darkness and melancholy of the original F. Scott Fitzgerald story, but then it's over and you're left realizing you wasted three hours of your life listening to variations on the question, "Are you growing younger?". Ironically, this film left me feeling old and crotchety. Get off my lawn, Brad Pitt.