Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3123 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

As a director, De Niro proves he's still a pretty good actor
Robert DeNiro and Matt Damon were responsible for possibly my biggest disappointment of 2007, The Good Shepherd, which has to be one of the five or six most boring films I have ever seen. When requesting the DVD from a friend for my birthday, I was expecting a complex, dour, all-star conspiracy thriller along the lines of the BBC's classic adaptation of John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. What I actually got was a film that was so dull the plot washed over me without leaving one mark on my memory. Pretty boy Damon is totally miscast as an uptight WASP required to age over thirty years during the course of the film, and even worse was Angelina Jolie, who went totally against her `sex bomb' typecasting to portray the neurotic, neglected, sexually famished (!) wife whom cold-fish CIA boss Damon hasn't got any time for. Michael Gambon, William Hurt, and DeNiro himself all had supporting roles, but their performances were so dull and lacking in any kind of relevance, emotional charge, or development that they seemed to drift in and out of the film for no reason and with no consequence; none were bad, of course, they were just boring. A pointless and soporific movie that lasted three hours but felt like six, it also joins the remake of Rollerball and Ang Lee's The Hulk on the very short list of films that have sent me to sleep on a first viewing; unfortunately the other two had the excuse that I watched them in the evening, in a dark cinema and after a long day's work. I first watched The Good Shepherd in my living room on a bright summer afternoon.

Above Average Spy Film; Let Down By Fictionalised History
The CIA's primary role at the time, covert operations in Guatemala, Iran and Cuba are barely explored. De Niro creates a fictional reason for the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and also contrives an allusion to the death of CIA scientist Frank Olson via surreptitious administration of LSD. It would have been preferable if Mr De Niro had stuck to the known facts.

Matt Damon's character is a dour and humourless man. Was the real James Angleton such a dull character? We do know he was later wracked by extreme paranoia, which some assert may have been clinical in nature. Damon can barely bring himself to communicate with his staff in many scenes. One cannot empathise with Damon's character and this is a major failure of the film. Are we meant to appreciate his burdens? He does not help us to do so if that is the intention.

The exploration of the Skull & Bones secrer society adds to the film's multiple threads. However one is left confused as to why CIA's founder, Gen William Donovan, who was not a Bonesman, recruited so many Ivy League oddballs into such an important organisation?

Despite the lead character's many unlikeable traits and amoral behaviour, if you like ponderous shots of men wearing raincoats walking slowly down empty corridors, this film's for you.

If you take one thing away from this film, remember Gen Donovan's quote: "I want the CIA to be American's eyes and ears, not its heart and soul."

The Good Shepherd
'The Good Shepherd' is one of those films that could have offered so much more, and sadly didn't. The cast was good, the direction was good, the story was good and yet nothing seemed to gel and you're left feeling strangely dissatisfied with everything. The story is very slow paced and although I can normally enjoy films of this type, I found this to be quite a laboured affair. Set against the backdrop of WW2 and the bay of pigs fiasco this story has some great historical touches and added some authenticity to the plot-line. I found it very strange how Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie seemed to age very little as the film progressed, especially with Damon looking the same at the start as at the end which is supposed to be 22 years later! At least they gave Jolie bags under her eyes, but that was about it. There were some excellent cameo appearances from the likes of Joe Pesci and the few scenes with De Niro were very good. Overall, if you like espionage type films, but without the thrills and action, then this is the film for you, otherwise you can safely give this a miss and not worry in the slightest.