Skip The Watchmen

...it's three hours of your life you'll end up wanting back. I read and passably enjoyed the comic series some years ago, and had some anticipation of seeing an ambitious and unusual film; but while the film definitely has pretentions of being deep and meaningful, for the most part - after the first half-hour - it falls completely flat. Whether there is a coherency to its narrative that eclipsed me - a political reading to the film that makes it profound and interesting - I will leave others to decide; none occured to me. What I did notice was that there are many paper-thin performances, long passages that simply carry no dramatic interest whatsoever, completely meaningless bits of violence-for-its-own sake that suggest a rather low level of respect for the audience, and a love scene that is so cringe-inducingly bad (set, alas, to Leonard Cohen's "Hallejulah") that one wonders if Zack Snyder is, in fact, a 13 year old virgin male whose sole experience of sex comes via MTV and porn. I laughed aloud, rolled my eyes, and waited in horror for the three hour mess to end.

Tony Bardach apparently has a cameo - I caught his name in the credits, without having recognized him in the film (as a sleazy john soliciting a blowjob, if memory serves). There's also a pretty energetic and enthusiastic (if truncated and not particularly original) punk reading of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row" by My Chemical Romance - a band I have previously ignored - that plays as the credits roll; it generates more drama than anything in the film, which is a sad statement indeed. I'd skip this one if I were you - redeem my suffering by learnin' from it: The Watchmen is a waste of your time.