Poor planning

Although I appreciate it is always hard to come down from the Oscars and that special, magical tingle in the air — if I hadn’t turned in after MasterChef, as I always do, I would have certainly stayed up all night to watch — it’s time to get back to business and this week’s big film The Adjustment Bureau, which could do with a significant amount of adjusting itself.

Although I appreciate it is always hard to come down from the Oscars and that special, magical tingle in the air — if I hadn’t turned in after MasterChef, as I always do, I would have certainly stayed up all night to watch — it’s time to get back to business and this week’s big film The Adjustment Bureau, which could do with a significant amount of adjusting itself.

It’s preposterously silly, but that’s kind of OK. Aren’t we all preposterously silly at times? Isn’t Gregg preposterously silly when he says ‘cooking doesn’t get tougher than this’, even though it so could if you only had one leg, say, and then your hip fell out and your oven went on the blink? So preposterous silliness is fine, I’m all for it, but when preposterous silliness starts taking itself seriously, boy, are you in trouble, and that is the trouble here.

The Adjustment Bureau is fun and rather engaging until you start thinking, hang on, we’re actually meant to believe in all this? It’s not ironic? After that, it’s plain annoying, tiresome and dopey, and it just sort of drags itself to the end, which would, at least, be an original end if only it weren’t one of those furiously paced races against time. Do they make it? I can’t say, as that would be a spoiler, but if I were to think ‘yes’ and ‘how could I have doubted it?’ you’d certainly be heading in the right direction.