The film opens on a young baby being lowered in a basket on the side of a ship in the nineteen hundreds before going back and forth to 1895 and settling our audience in on a story that might finally make sense (don’t get your hopes up.) The baby in a basket is supposed to signify Moses but when he grows up, he’s clearly Colin Farrell. And his name is Peter. The voice of a young woman narrates something about ‘magic is all around us’ and apparently time and distance aren’t what they appear. Colin Farrell is drawn to this voice, that turns out to be a gorgeous red head named Beverly (Jessica Brown Findlay), better known to all of us as Lady Sybil, dying in childbirth, on Dowton Abbey.
While the two lovers have chemistry on the screen, and just when we hope to fall in love with them, life LITERALLY become heaven and hell, angels and demons (Rusell Crowe) and even Lucifer (Will Smith). You find yourself asking a lot of questions including, why does Russell Crowe keep taking these villainous and one dimensional roles. Didn’t he just play the same doom and gloom in Les Miserable? He doesn’t actually think the weird fake facial scar across his cheek makes for a character change?
The brilliant writer and producer Akiva Goldsman directs her first film here, about a man (Farrell) who well, we’re not quite sure what his purpose is except he walks around holding a small gold sign that reads “City of Justice” and seems hellbent on saving two dying red headed women. Don’t ask. Goldsman, most famous for the Oscar nominated A Beautiful Mind, seems to take us by the hand and except us to feel deep Titanic-like weight to every twisting scene through some magical labyrinth. And oh yes, there’s a white magical horse who swoops down with wings. The only positive angel in the film, is the appearance of Eva Marie Saint who makes her first screen appearance since Superman Returns. There are so many more questions to be asked beginning with why does Satan hate Colin Farrell so much? But the answer falls on the viewer, where suspension of disbelief is its only plausible answer.