Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3280 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-06-18
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Dubbed, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish, Bulgarian, German
• Dubbed in: Spanish, German
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 160 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A complicated movie about the Central Intelligence Agency and its agents, The Good Shepherd isn't your typical spy movie. Though it stars Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity films) and Angelina Jolie (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Lara Croft franchise)--actors with considerable experience in the action-espionage genre--The Good Shepherd requires that they play more subdued and (much less interesting) characters here. The movie focuses on the career or Edward Wilson (Damon), a privileged Yale graduate who goes on to help found the CIA. He is a quiet, serious, and guarded man, even in the most intimate moments with his civilian wife (Jolie, in a role that wastes her talent). Set against a backdrop of real-life events such as the Bay of Pigs, The Good Shepherd is meticulous in creating a realistic timeframe. The film gets a jolt of excitement when Robert DeNiro (in his first directing role since 1993's A Bronx Tale) peppers the screen with appearances by Joe Pesci, Alec Baldwin, and William Hurt. But those moments are too infrequent. At 157 minutes long, the film is crammed with many factual details, but the characters are shortchanged when it comes to development. Viewers have to wonder why anyone, much less someone like Wilson who has everything going for him, would devote his life to a thankless job that brings so little happiness to himself and his family. The Good Shepherd is an ambitious but flawed film. The actors do a formidable job with a well-intentioned but meandering script. However, we meet so many characters and learn so little about each that it's difficult to drum up much empathy for any of them. --Jae-Ha Kim

Synopsis
With The Good Shepherd, Robert De Niro (A Bronx Tale) makes an ambitious return to the director’s chair. A labour of love for Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), the film tells an epic, fictionalised account of how the Central Intelligence Agency was born. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a reserved young man who graduated from Yale in the late 1930s. His membership in the exclusive Skull and Bones society led him away from poetry and into a relationship with the federal government, who recruited him to help them on several covert operations. Roth’s script alternates between Wilson’s gradual emergence as a genuine government operative in the early 1940s and the infamous Bay of Pigs conflict in the early 1960s. Along the way, he has a sweet romance with a pretty deaf girl (a sparkling Tammy Blanchard) and ends up marrying the woman he makes pregnant (Angelina Jolie) out of a strong sense of duty. Throughout the film, the emergence of a mysterious tape haunts Wilson, who is determined to uncover the truth behind a leak in his secret organisation. Production designer Jeannine Claudia Oppewall (L.A. Confidential, Catch Me if You Can) and costume designer Ann Roth (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley) faithfully recreate these earlier periods in American history, while the imagery of Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson (J.F.K., The Aviator) casts a warm, stately glow upon De Niro’s assembled cast of luminaries (including Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Joe Pesci). The result is a production that recalls Francis Ford Coppola’'s The Conversation and Steven Spielberg'’s Munich.

Customer Reviews

I spy with my little eye - something beginning with `d' - for dull.
De Niro makes a surprising move here into spy territory - not modern Bourne type stuff (despite the presence of Matt Damon) but more like an American John Le Carre type story, in its understated events and emphasis on character. It's a noble endeavor, at times wonderfully shot - however, it is ultimately too flawed to succeed as entertainment.
The story revolves around the creation of the CIA, seen through the eyes of Edward Wilson (a composite of several real life characters). It plays as a character driven story showing what can make a man choose a life of permanent paranoia and secrecy, and the impact that has on his life. In this way the atmosphere around the time of the new Agency's genesis is portrayed rather than a strict blow by blow account of how it came to be. A superb and committed cast have been gathered, (including a blink and you'll miss it cameo from Joe Pesci), and there is a clear feeling of the proceedings oozing talent, from art direction and photography, through to actors and music.
However, there is something about the pacing that is not quite right - at 160 minutes, we should have some significant moments of drama to drive our interest on, but somehow we are left with a spy story of non-people and non-events... a spy movie without suspense. There's an interesting enough story arc for our main character, and the audience is asked to be intelligent enough to fill in some gaps - but the padding has turned what could have been an atmospheric and informative movie into something bloated and dull. This is no epic or definitive account.
Regular readers of mine will know I am no huge fan of rapid fire MTV style editing a la `Armageddon' and its ilk - but a movie still has to have some drive and entertainment value. That's missing here, despite the core having some very interesting things to say about the disease of loneliness and what it does to a man. Sad to say, no endorsement from me on this one, even though it has moments that really make me want to like it.

Boring, rambling and miscast
This film sets itself some ambitious targets and misses just about all of them. It's at least 30 minutes too long; it jumps about confusingly in time and, as others have commented, we find out so little about the characters' motives that it's hard to take much of an interest.

But the biggest problem is Matt Damon, who simply isn't credible as the man he's supposed to be playing. At the start of the film, we see him leaving for work in 1960. As he gets on the bus, we look back at his house and think, "That's a big house for such a young man." Then, later that same day, we see both ends of a phone conversation between Damon and a man of about the same apparent age - 12 - which the other young man concludes by addressing Damon as 'father'. Damon, we are expected to believe, is at this stage of the story aged 41.
Then we flash back to Yale in 1939, and the only this that tells us Damon is now 21 years younger is that that he's swapped his glitzy (almost-)Kennedy-era glasses for something plainer and rounder. In fact, Damon's eyewear is probably the best clue the film offers as to what's going on and how old he's supposed to be. He's reasonably convincing as his younger self, not so in the least as the man he becomes. And, given that the whole 150-minute film has to hang on this flimsy hook, it's inevitable that it all ends up in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Loss of interest
We settled down for an evening of entertainment - what a disappointment! The film failed to "hook" us and so after 45 minutes gave up and went to bed.