Side-Effects include "Sleep Crime"

(Pictured: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Leonardo DiCaprio)

(As a disclaimer, the title comes from a 30 Rock episode. Liz Lemon is taking sleeping pills before getting on a plane and reads the side-effects aloud to Jack. I literally could not stop thinking about that scene throughout this movie.)

It’s never a good sign when 15 minutes into a film, one genuinely questions whether or not one has missed at least an hour and a half of plot. I’m all for stories starting off confusing and then becoming clearer as they unfold, in fact I love those kinds of movies. But this one started out confusing, remained confusing, and ended with one of the most groan-worthy “Aha!” finales in recent cinema.

That said, I did enjoy myself while watching it and I will be the last person to say it wasn’t entertaining or visually boggling, but never once did I find myself regarding it as anything other than your typical pseudo-intellectual summer blockbuster (of which Christopher Nolan is the reigning king).


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I’m not going to get into an in-depth summary here, mainly because that would take forever and honestly I’m still trying to figure some things out, but in essence, it’s Shutter Island meets The Matrix meets every Christopher Nolan film ever. In some sort of dystopian 21st Century, certain people have developed the ability to infiltrate another’s subconscious in order to obtain valuable information that they are unable to get via conscious interaction. They are called “extractors” (I think?) and Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon Levitt are the best of the best when it comes to this technique.

Through some corporate intrigue scandal that eventually becomes all but irrelevant to the point of the film, our leading duo under the employ of Ken Watanabe must assemble a team and infiltrate the mind of the heir to a powerful energy company (Cillian Murphy). However, DiCaprio’s got some serious emotional baggage- in the form of Marion Cotillard no less, and could very well sabotage the entire operation.

The performances are hit and miss all around. I always expect to hate Leonardo DiCaprio and I really never do, which was pleasantly true here, still, he was essentially doing a slightly more stoic version of Teddy Daniels, his Shutter Island character. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with whom I’ve never been very impressed, spoke and moved with an obnoxiously obvious determination to say to the audience “look how devastatingly cool I am.” Marion Cotillard, who in my book can do no wrong, was by no means bad, but bizarrely melodramatic. Granted, she is playing a woman with serious psychological issues, but it still felt uncharacteristically overdone.

To be perfectly honest, I’d say my favorite performance came from Ellen Page as the inventive newbie architect Ariadne (is that seriously a name?). She was the audience’s anchor in a very complicated sci-fi world and did a great job at maintaining a necessary element of skepticism to the entire concept of stealing from someone’s brain. Tom Hardy was also a stand-out as Eames, a sarcastic scruffy Brit who seems to have stepped out of a Guy Ritchie film in order to join DiCaprio’s ranks.

Visually it is extremely impressive. The zero-gravity fight scene in an imaginary hotel has to be one of the coolest ever to exist on film, not to mention the city of Paris as an anti-physics free for all. But for all of this labyrinthine plot-weaving that truly defies comprehension and may in fact require a second viewing, all of that to boil down to a slightly more open-ended “It was all a dream!” twist just feels like some kind of cruel joke on the audience. Ah well, at least the fanboys have a new film to vote into a top 10 slot on the imdb Top 250 Films of All Time. I believe it is currently at #3. Oy.