True Grit - Cineworld Edinburgh - 15/2/11

Have you seen this yet?

No?

OK.

My advice would be...don't.

It's not very good.

Seriously.

I know you will have read reviews from "real" journalists who have ranted and raved about this but I promise you...they are lying.  Either they are laboring under the weight of their memories of the original or they have received a goody bag from the PR bods that was so wonderful that it would be rude to do anything other than give a glowing review.

I haven't seen the original and PR companies don't give me any freebies so I can give it to you straight.

This was yet another awful film from the Coen Brothers that can sit proudly alongside "Burn After Reading", "A Serious Man", "Tuileries" (from "Paris J'Taime"), "The Ladykillers", "Intolerable Cruelty", "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "The Hudsucker Proxy" (a film so awful that some people have convinced themselves it must be brilliant...it's not).

With each film that passes it looks more and more likely that the Coens are lucky as opposed to talented...sometimes what they conjure up works brilliantly but more often than not the whole thing is amateurish at best and dreadful at worst.

"True Grit" should have been brilliant.

A great story.

Like "No Country For Old Men" it is a Western revenge thriller.

Jeff Bridges.

Matt Damon.

An Oscar winning original film as a template.

A pulp novel much loved by people who like that sort of thing as the source.

Sadly all of that counts for nothing as messy editing, ridiculously over the top performances and a delivery from Bridges that is, literally, impossible to understand all combine to leave you with the cinematic equivalent of finding out that the beautiful girl you are meeting from the online dating service has used a photograph from ten years and four stone ago as her profile pic.  Disappointed, frustrated and yearning for what could have been.