After a pretty solid first act, I got lost in the weeds, distracted, and wound up having no idea what was going on this movie. So I stopped, reversed, and picked it up where it’d lost me. I then got lost in the weeds, distracted, and wound up having no idea what going on in this movie. Again.

The flick stars Russell Crowe as a retired detective with Alzheimer’s. When he learns a death row inmate wants him to return to an investigation he’s forgotten, he does so in order to keep his mind sharp. The investigation leads him to old friends forgotten and nefarious schemes and all that jazz.

The Alzheimer’s bit of this plot is also mirrored by a bad car accident the detective got into… and an experimental brain surgery he’s taking part in now. And I’m not sure – or I have forgotten – why these three versions of memory loss are so important to the film… other than to hide clues and plotlines until the script says its time to reveal them.

But I did like the film’s setup and parts of its ongoing mystery. There’s a point where we get a narrative flashback that had me baffled… not in that I didn’t know what was going on, but why we spent so long in a fictional backstory using real characters. It just served to obfuscate what was really going on… or show exactly what was going on… or some version in between.

Then the movie has the longest final act ever. A tedious, sluggish, gloomy series of scenes that had me wondering why we couldn’t wrap this up quicker. Glance at watch… how is there twenty more minutes of this droning noise? If they could have tightened or chopped much of the final act, I’d have come in with a slighter better rating.

There’s part of me that wanted to like this movie more but it kept fighting back. Fighting back until I was through with it. Over. Bored. Done.

Score: 67