THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

This film is well cast and well made, but it's fucking stupid.  Matt Damon is a generic New York Congressman running for the Senate who keeps getting cock-blocked by magic-hat-wearing, water-fearing angels that include John Slattery, Anthony Mackie, and Terence Stamp.  The eternal quest of these semi-ageless Hatmen is to keep Matt Damon apart from the love of his life, Emily Blunt, because it will ostensibly lead to Matt Damon becoming President of the United States and Blunt becoming the most famous dancer/choreographer in America.  So they have to abandon their passionate love for each other so she can become Paula Abdul?  Uhhh....

Even Matt Damon points out to the Hatmen that their explanations are spurious at best, and that their story keeps changing under pressure, like a suspect in an interrogation room trying to tell the detective what he wants to hear.  Its pretty obvious that the Hatmen are not infallible; most of the events of the movie occur because one of them fell asleep and missed his mark to fuck with Damon's life.  The way they fuck with Matt Damon's life is questionable; they arrange for him to make out with a British chick in the mens-room of a fancy hotel on the night he loses an election so that she will inspire him to give a really cynical, calculating speech that decries cynicism and calculation in politics.  And my bullshit alarm just exploded.  Could you (the Hatmen) please offer a semi-retarded explanation that sounds like a fussy 9th grader who knows just enough about history to get it completely fucking wrong?

The Hatmen explain that every time they back off and let man(kind) sort out their own (love)lives terrible things happen to the planet, and they use real historical dates and events to back up their preposterous bullshit.  Terence Stamp claims that shit on earth was fine and dandy from the Renaissance until 1910 because the Hatmen were running things, but then when they backed off, we managed to cause all sorts of terrible shit to happen, all the way up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Hatmen decided they had to start controlling us again.  Should I come up with all sorts of examples of terrible things that happened during those several centuries, or is it so fucking painfully obvious that listening to the venerable Terence Stamp deliver such a moronic speech makes me (and probably him) long for the days when he menaced Superman with comparatively-clever lines like "Kneel Before Zod!"

This film was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, whose chemically-inspired and metaphysical work is usually significantly altered for the screen, sometimes producing classic films like Blade Runner or Total Recall or Minority Report and sometimes producing not-so-classic films like Paycheck or Next or this dud; the only film adaptation that attempts to capture the baroque, paranoid, and fascinating nature of his prose is the schizophrenic and not necessarily-entertaining A Scanner Darkly which also uses rotoscoping to simulate/stimulate insanity in the viewer.

The internets claim that the original 'Adjustment Team' short story had a talking dog.  Serious mistake cutting that dog out of this movie.  I would have loved to see a talking dog following Matt Damon around and heckling him.

"Fuck you Matt Damon!"