The more astute amongst you will have noticed that the makers of this film accidently let a typo in the film title slip through into general release. It’s not obvious at first, but if you read it carefully, you’ll notice it. Just in case you don’t, I’ll point it out as I know it will be frustrating otherwise. Where is says “curious”, it was meant to say “fucking unbearably long and boring”. Obvious now I mention it isn’t it?

Too long. Just too fucking long. Nothing even happens. There are some long films that have to be long to fit in all the things that are in the story, but there’s no story here, there’s just a fuck load of long. This film could have been 17 minutes long. Observe.

Scene 1 (4 minutes)

Woman gives birth, dad sees the baby and says “fuck me, it’s old and nasty”. Dad gives baby to servant and tell him to take it to an orphanage

Scene 2 (3 minutes)

Brad Pitt meets little girl he ends up getting with.

Scene 3 (3 minutes)

Brad Pitt gets with girl he ends up getting with

Scene 4 (4 minutes)

Brad Pitt splits up with girl he ended up getting with

Scene 5 (3 minutes)

Brad Pitt dies

End

That’s it, that’s all that happened in this film, the rest was just padding. Dull meaningless padding. When it finally seemed like it was creeping painfully towards the end, I actually yelled “Please just finish” in the cinema and the agreement around me was obvious. You should never make a film this long, it was 16 hours long. Just too long.

It wasn’t even bad, it just wasn’t good either, and I’m afraid it was too long to just be OK. A film has to be good in order to justify the length of time this bastard took from me. I couldn’t even get any hidden gay titillation from seeing Brad Pitt in all his sexy glory because he was old and saggy for most of the film. His love interest was also irritating and plain and the total lack of chemistry between them left you questioning why they even wanted to be together anyway.

It felt a lot like they were deliberately making it long, and that it had had chapters forced into it after the story had been written. It was similar to Forest Gump, in that it lurched from one little phase of his life to another little phase, and any one of those phases could have been removed without it affecting the overall story of the film. The difference between the two films however is that Forest Gump was entertaining, and Benjamin Button was just painfully boring. Benjamin Button is like Forest Gump minus the entertainment, intrigue, likable characters, interesting overriding story, and basically any other good quality you can think of that Forest Gump had.

Also, did I mention that it was really really long?

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