***SPOILERS BELOW***<br /><br />Watching the trailer for 'The Interpreter', I was initially intrigued. I love a good political thriller, and I see Sean Penn and Sydney Pollack involved….I'm game. Never mind Nicole Kidman, I'm not a fan and probably never will be; she just irks me. Anyhow, as much as I liked the trailer, it's VERY flawed in that I basically knew what was going to happen in the film…..namely who the 'bad guy' is. It really spoiled the movie for me. I'm smarter than the average Joe; I can't believe people still fall for the 'oh my goodness, the bad guy is actually the person who appears to be the victim, the good guy!!' twist. It's very lame and overdone. Try something new people! Even so I had to depend on the execution of this to come away satisfied overall. That does NOT happen here….at ALL.<br /><br />The acting here is good overall, nice cinematography all around, but what absolutely kills 'The Interpreter' is the script. My GOD the script is horrible! My friend sitting next to me asked me if it was written in crayon. It minus well had been written in crayon, because it doesn't get more childish than this. Kidman's character now ranks up there with Monica Bellucci's horrid 'performance' in Tears of the Sun as one of the most annoying characters ever in film; and what pisses me off is that this type of character is getting more and more prevalent in movies like this. From the beginning Kidman's character walks around completely clueless, lying every chance she gets holding information from anyone/everyone who's trying to help her. What killed me was when Penn asked her who she met with in the park and she simply answers, 'it's personal'. I was about to walk out the theater after hearing that. You'd think that in a pressure situation where you had bitched and moaned earlier about possibly not getting any protection, you'd be a LITTLE more cooperative with the people who are now PROTECTING YOU! Who writes this crap? 'It's personal'??? The writers couldn't come up with a better answer than that??? All throughout the movie we gotta sit through the torture of seeing Kidman lie and hide things from the very people she's depending on, like it's a game or something. At one point Penn shows her a picture he found of her and her brother, holding machine guns walking down a street in Africa some time ago. Penn, now expecting her to finally come clean after about 2-3 previous meetings like these (where he uncovers another one of her lies), and the best thing that Kidman could say is…..get this……'that's not me'. WHAT??? What do you mean 'that's not me?' Only after more pressing from Penn does she admit that the woman in the picture (her) isn't the type of person she is now. Penn isn't innocent of corny/lame/pointless dialogue either….as we get the pleasure of going through more of his emotional, 'oh woe is me' soliloquies throughout the film, at times without ANY provocation. I swear in a scene or two they'd be talking about something political or a conspiracy and Penn just bust out talking about his dead wife. Where the hell did THAT come from? And how many more times does the hero/good guy of the film have to be a drunk, never mind the reason?<br /><br />This movie, running at 2 hrs and 8 mins, could've been cut down by at least 40 minutes easily. By simply doing away with the run-around supplied by Kidman, and lame subtle attempts at a romantic angle….scenes that seem like Pollack was all too happy to film and make the movie drag even more, would have STARTED to make the movie's execution a little better. I say 'started' because the script on a whole is just a total mess. After a while there's just blabbering going on and you don't even care who's who and who's working for this one or that one and he has conflict with him because of someone else's agenda blah blah blah. Other things I didn't like:<br /><br />- the bus scene was filmed nicely, but what was REALLY her point of getting on the bus? <br /><br />- Who was the assassin who was after Kidman working for? <br /><br />- Just why in the hell did she turn on the light in the interpreter's room anyway?? <br /><br />- You mean to tell me that the whole thing was just faking an assassination attempt in order to get more 'credibility'?? <br /><br />- Kidman goes through all of this lying and hiding to get to the President, just for him to read a few passages in a book he wrote and that she knows by heart??? <br /><br />- She attempts to murder an international government figure, and all they do to her is 'send her home'?? Isn't she a citizen of her home country (where she really will be just 'going home'), but also a citizen of the US…where she can be tried and sentenced like any one of us? <br /><br />I refuse to waste anymore time on this joke of a political thriller…I've wasted enough. I only went to see this because I was taking a friend of mine out for her birthday and this is what she wanted to see. Now I remember why I said I would not be going to the movies for a long while. Total waste of time and money.<br /><br />* out of **** stars.