Review – The Good Shepherd

What a disappointment. Perhaps if I hadn’t recently re-watched Our Man in Havana (a movie that does just about everything right that this effort does wrong) I might have been able to muster a bit more charity. Or then again, maybe not. The subject here is the birth of the CIA, from its origins at the beginning of the Cold War to its great failure at the Bay of Pigs. Or at least that should have been the subject. Instead we get Matt Damon as a nerdy little poetry student at Yale who – via Skull and Bones – gets caught up in the high-stakes world of international espionage. Rather than focusing on what The Company was up to in these crucial years, most of this movie is devoted to the hero’s ever-deepening paranoia and its impact on his family life. So what on the surface looks like a top-notch spy thriller turns out to be a mediocre soap opera. Actor / director Robert DeNiro should have known better than this. Mildly amusing