I found it to be awful. It goes off the rails fairly early.

It's visually stunning and well-acted, but loses its way quite a bit throughout its running time. Still, I thought it was decent.

B-

Uninteresting, dull, lifeless, and boring, are the words that immediately come to mind after watching The Good German, thanks to Steven Soderbergh. I'm sure there is a good movie within the content and I'm sure it made for a great book, but the way Soderbergh translated it to screen is next to awful. Black and white works for some films. It sometimes enhances the story. It doesn't work here, and I can't quite put my finger on why. I think it would be slightly unfair to call Soderbergh pompus for using black and white here, but I'm going to call him pompus anyway. Maybe the difference does lie within the storytelling? Maybe instead of focusing on the look of the film - like using resources that only would've been available in the '40s, and trying to essentially create "his own" Casablanca (The final scene in this film was flat out insulting, instead of having the homage effect he was going for) he could've focused on the plot, which we are just thrust into and don't give two shits about because it's lifeless and boring. That probably would've helped.

And he isn't helped out much by the acting. Everyone is decent to bad. Clooney's okay, but in some scenes he comes across as a poor man's Bogart. Blanchett is dull as hell. Were we supposed to by that accent? And then there is Maguire. When I think Maguire, I think badass. The scenes early on with him beating up Clooney, and pushing around Blanchett just came across as being funny. He looks like he's five feet tall and thirteen, and he's kicking ass. Great casting.

And then there is the look of the film. Good, I guess? Who cares. If the story is uninteresting, why do I care what the film looks like?

The film just didn't work for me.

D

C+


It's stylish and beautifully shot. But it's also very follow, using the story just as the pretense to show off some nice visuals. Cate Blanchett is really good here (when is she not good anyway?) and Tobey Magure is surprisingly convincing, though seeing him beating up Clooney was somewhat weird, heh. Overall, though, I think it could have been done better. Clooney himself seems unusually bland here and mostly devoid of his usual charm. The reveals of the story are interesting, but for some reason none of them ever emotionally connected with me. I think the movie's main flaw is that there's never any chemistry felt between Blanchett and Clooney. For a movie that tries hard to imitate Casablanca, the lack of the cchemistry between the leads is fatal (considering how great the chemistry is between Bergman and Bogart in the aforementioned flick).