Snowden

Based on true events, Snowden follows notorious whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he becomes increasingly disillusioned with his orders at the NSA and, eventually, decides to leak thousands of classified documents to the press. There’s little doubt that Snowden fares best in its fairly captivating opening half hour, as filmmaker Oliver Stone does a strong job of establishing the central character and his ascension from army cadet to government employee – with the movie’s watchable vibe perpetuated and heightened by Gordon-Levitt’s typically solid work as the central character. (This is despite the fact that he does this weird thing with his voice that’s never not distracting.) It’s clear, however, that Snowden begins its slow-but-steady nosedive into mediocrity as it moves into its seriously repetitive midsection, as scripters Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald shift the focus to an intense emphasis on the minutia of the protagonist’s top-secret work – with the narrative’s structure, past a certain point, doggedly following Snowden as he moves from one assignment to the next. The increasingly less-than-compelling vibe is compounded by Stone’s inability to effectively develop the relationship between Snowden and his girlfriend (Shailene Woodley’s Lindsay Mills), with the majority of such scenes suffering from a bland and generic feel that proves disastrous. There’s consequently a lack of momentum here that grows more and more pronounced as time slowly progresses, while the movie’s anti-climactic final stretch ensures that Snowden ends on as underwhelming and forgettable a note as one could envision – which ultimately confirms the movie’s place as a tremendously disappointing missed opportunity and yet another subpar effort from a once-vital filmmaker.

*1/2 out of ****