Word: dullness
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...detective who yet retains a few interesting Japanophobic tics, is the chief explainer. It also helps that lively Wesley Snipes is the younger man he's mentoring through this exercise. But it would be nice to see Connery doing something intrinsically interesting instead of trying to make something inherently dull entertaining. And it would be good to see Snipes cut loose more than he is able to here. But that's the way things go in this cautious adaptation of a "controversial" book. It makes you realize that Crichton's novel was largely powered by his animus against the Japanese...
Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children is that rarest of books: it actually explores everything after that obligatory colon in the title. The book, which is almost never dull, tracks the growth of Nintendo from a Japanese playing-card company founded in 1889 to an international video-game behemoth that by 1992 consistently earned after-tax profits of more than $500 million a year. That's more than all U.S. movie studios combined and more than IBM, Apple or Microsoft...
Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), McDeere's mentor at the firm, is now a much more interesting character. A heavy-drinking womanizer who uses alcohol and sex to dull the pain of his wife's rejection while managing to retain a shred of human compassion at the end, his relationship with Abby is one of the strongest parts of the film. The contrast between the young, innocent wife and the older, jaded lawyer and her ultimate emergence as the stronger character is painful but dynamic to watch...
...BOTTOM LINE: This dull, incoherent survey gives radicalism a bad name...
Otherwise, the "Aperto" is apocalyptic trivia, devoid of aesthetic impulse. Everything is on much the same dull, hectoring, narcissistic and politically simpleminded level; all complexity of artistic response has been ironed down into puerile rhetoric, one-liners that have no further resonance once you've got their meager point. Some have no point: How about a nice big wall covered in monochrome orange carpet, or a giant mound of Plasticine? The mix of witless conceptualism, pseudo documentary and weakly recycled minimalism is stifling...