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Created Apr 10, 2013 07:58PM PST • Edited Apr 14, 2013 03:26AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Barely OK 2.0

   The poster tells the tale. Robert Pattinson starring in a David Cronenberg movie of a Don DeLillo book is all you need to know about Cosmopolis. A deeply surreal fable about the evil rich as embodied by a soulless manqué sums it up. Oh yeah, bloody wounds get inflicted. It is a David Cronenberg movie after all.

   Fabulous fable though it may be, Cosmopolis ultimately fails because it is flat out ridiculous. Slow, stagy and stultified, its reach far exceeds its grasp. Beware or be bored. Be very bored.

   Recent heartthrob Robert Pattinson rides around in a limo that hardly moves, looking all the world like a financial vampire in a four-wheeled stretch coffin. His delivery? Not much different than when he acted undead. His lines? Gibberish about trading stocks and currencies — market economics as seen by the Nihilistic Left. Thus Cosmopolis sounds more like kids playing business than moguls conducting business.

   Instead of Nic Cage with a death wish in Las Vegas, Cosmopolis offers up Robert Pattinson chasing death in Manhattan. Leaving New York could have been the title. As far as I was concerned, he couldn’t die soon enough in this painfully protracted movie. Instead, it turns into a poorly realized homage to Waiting for Godot, a development that’s just another exquisite disappointment in a movie that revels in them.

4. Acting

   OK 2.5

   Robert Pattinson is not believable as a bad guy. Callow and spoiled, yes. Evil, no. That said, his face is rather amazing, sculptural looking, with eyebrows and lips like broad strokes from a painter’s brush.

   He has sex with damn near half a dozen women, all of whom keep their tops on. I suspect this has more to do with contractual restrictions imposed by the actresses than the imagined proclivities of Pattinson’s playboy – his shades of grey as it were. Neither does he expose much of himself, not even a bare buttock. Thus his character embraces risk but he does not, making the movie all the more phony as a result.

   Every other actor is allotted little more than cameos beside him.

   • Paul Giamatti overacts to little effect.
   • Kevin Durand is an odd mix of pretty boy and macho man.
   • Juliette Binoche provides a dose of mature sexiness, albeit not a very sexy dose of sexiness despite having limo sex with Pattinson.
   • Sarah Gadon cuts a distinctive figure as his sophisticated but disillusioned wife.
   • Jay Baruchel as a whiner named Shiner.
   • Mathieu Amalric as a sniveling anarchist. Typecasting?
   • Patricia McKenzie provides a shot of exotic sexiness — no qualifiers required.

5. Male Stars Barely OK 2.0

6. Female Stars OK 2.5

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Good 3.0

10. Film

    Barely OK 2.0

    Cronenberg does DeLillo, the cinematic master of diseased decay interpreting the literary prince of diseased politics. Their film is about a billionaire playboy with a death wish, nihilism being a principal obsession of both the Left and the cinema.

    The result is too literary for film, even if Cosmopolis is oddly all about the imagery of wealth. The image is this: An embodiment of wealth who is immune to the travails of society around him insulates himself from it. That may work on the page, if you share DeLillo’s worldview, but it fails on the screen.

    The film barely exceeds execrableness, mostly due to a literary pedigree that fitfully proves itself with pungent lines of self-pity. Smoking is “one of those things a girl takes up at 15 to tell herself she’s more than a skinny body no one notices.” Good one.

11. Direction OK 2.5

12. Play Pretty Bad 1.5

13. Music OK 2.5

14. Visuals Barely OK 2.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 3.0

    Mild by Cronenberg standards, if you know what I mean.

17. Sex Erotic 3.4

18. Violence Brutal 3.0

19. Rudeness Profane 2.6

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.7

    Cosmopolis conflates economics with fashion, a common misconception on the Left. It includes a paean to the “Specter of Capitalism” and the following dopey line.

    You know what they say. The logical extension of capitalism is murder.

    What who says? On second thought, who cares.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 3.0

23. Biological Surreal 3.0

24. Physical Glib 2.0