If Philip K. Dick were alive today he’d have to be pretty happy with the run of adaptations of his work. Sure, there was Next, but that Nic Cage shocker is more than offset by the individual brilliance of both Blade Runner and Total Recall, as well as a slew of generally well-regarded supporting acts, including Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Confessions d’un Barjo.
It might not come as a great surprise that The Adjustment Bureau won’t make it into that top tier of Dick adaptations. In fact, it’s probably worth an entry in the midfield competent entertainment but not particularly great filmmaking.
Matt Damon plays honest but reckless United States congressman, David Norris, whose career is continually sabotaged by trifling public misdemeanours think Good Will Hunting ten years on and you get the general picture. Currently shooting for a place in the senate, he is once again undone by his own flaky behaviour, and while he practices his concession speech in the bathroom runs into the mysteriously spunky Elise (Emily Blunt).
It’s love at first snappy exchange and before he or we know it, Norris is in love, stopping buses and stalking street corners in search of the beautiful girl from the bog. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit with the plans of a mysterious faction of fedora-clad spooks, led by Richardson (John Slattery, hopefully paid extra for hijacking the Mad Men costume van), who have the power to ‘adjust’ life when things aren’t quite singing as they’d like.
It will soon turn into a battle of wills between them and Norris. When an accidental reveal to the congressman doesn’t even put him off, the men in hats call on The Hammer (they should have just called him The Black Mamba and been done with it) Terence Stamp freaking people out per usual, as he uses an extraordinary amount of elliptical exposition on Damon while one of the angels/aliens/fascists (Anthony Mackie) caves in to his own conscience and begins to help the love-struck couple.
As such, The Adjustment Bureau is a perfectly acceptable feature film, but Philip K. Dick stories deserve a little more than to be just ‘acceptable’. George Nolfi is one of the writers behind both the Bourne and Ocean’s series and here he’s directing for the first time. It’s a surprise then that Bureau’s problems lie with a middling script that never quite explains the required rules of its own world, and fails to establish some clearly defined stakes, thus neutering the jeopardy. What happens if Norris doesn’t become a senator? Some ‘tool’ (Will’s Norris’s terminology, not mine) get’s the job instead. Great. I’m onboard. As for the iconoclastic Elise, she won’t become a famous dancer: very sad.
Thankfully, Damon and Blunt prove an attractive couple, even if their characters’ made for each other banter grates heavily at times. Slattery is always a lot of fun, but on this occasion is disappointingly sidelined about halfway through the film. Mackie, star of The Hurt Locker, seems to struggle a little with the blank elements of his character and The Black Mamba pretty much plays The Black Mamba.
Everything looks appropriately crisp and clean courtesy of DOP John Troll, and Thomas Newman lends a slick score, but there’s just one misjudgement after another in The Adjustment Bureau: the lack of threat from the bad guys, the endless, circular exposition, the embarrassing John Stewart/Michael Bloomberg cameos. When The Adjustment Bureau puts its head down it sprints in fine style it’s just a pity the filmmakers seem much happier jogging their way to the final credits.
I say:
An everyman thriller nothing more, nothing less.
See it for:
Dapper ‘bad’ guys.
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