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This star-studded interpretation of Bob Dylan's life will leave you scratching your head. Although the posters attempt to convey that aspects of Dylan are being portrayed by a bunch of actors, it really doesn't become clear until about a half-hour into the film, whereupon you're suddenly realizing that you missed a lot of important details early on when you were trying to figure out what the entire storyline with the little black kid was all about.

While the acting is superb and many of the stars are impressive in atypical roles (look for a very mangy Richard Gere and a very French Cate Blanchett, for instance), the choppy nature of the editing leaves the storyline a battered mess for people who aren't totally up on Dylan's life. Compounding this, not only are the various aspects of his life portrayed by different actors, but they all have different names as well. In fact, with the exception of Alan Ginsburg and Woody Guthrie, EVERYONE in the film with  is portrayed by a fictitiously named character, leaving you preoccupied with guessing who they were supposed to be portraying rather than following the twists and turns of the plot.

In many ways, this film is a spiritual sibling of gonzo films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where imaginative reinterpretations and hallucinations of events leave you on a topsy-turvy ride that requires your full and careful attention, and often several viewings to catch all of the allusions and symbolism within... but unlike FLLV where there was an anchoring influence in the consistent characters, this movie jumps around so much in time, space, and character that by the time the credits roll you're left wondering what story actually got told in the course of the past two hours and fifteen minutes.

Seven sticky theatre floors out of ten, primarily for the outstanding acting. Though I like the underlying concept of exploring various parts of the psyche by assigning them unique characters, it needed just a little more introduction to prepare you.

There's nothing particularly special about this "thriller" which was released last year. Though the film involves computer hacking in a loose sense, the title has nothing to do with anything that actually takes place in the film and probably just sounded too good to pass up. Harrison Ford plays his typical gruff protagonist character (see also, Air Force One, all those Tom Clancy movies, and so forth) who has to defeat a band of brilliant evil men who are threatening him and his family.

The movie wastes no time setting up the plot other than to give one brief shot of Seattle to show us where the film is set (though it could have been set in Topeka as the setting had no bearing on the plot aside from letting them get away with a lot of dramatic rainy scenes), and about ten seconds of inexplicable hostile animosity between Ford and an otherwise underused Robert Patrick.

None of the characters undergo any character development to expand them beyond the one-dimensional stereotypes that are established in the few seconds of introduction. We've got the computer nerd, the dumb tough guy, the emotionally strong but physically weak child, the sorta-ditzy but smart secretary (who they try to use for comic relief in a few different ways), and of course the protective and..., and... uh, protective wife and mother. Ford's wife (played by Virginia Madsden) has nothing but cliched line after cliched line about wanting to protect her family while the bad guys sneer at her and refuse to give up their evil ways. There are a few scenes with her and her children that deserved to be cut but probably were saved since they were all so underused already. She also apparently had a subplot about being an architect, and I'm really not sure where they were going with that.

Virtually the entire first half of the movie acts as blatant foreshadowing and set-up for later events, such as an inexplicable conversation about leaving the collar on the dog, and a long early bit about a remote-control car which leaves hints that Ford is an electrical engineering genius (or something.) There are even a few scenes that defy justification unless parts of the script were later cut, such as a few long conversations about the name of a sailboat the family owns (once in the context of giving a secret code to the bad guys, and once in a tacky scene between Madsden and the kids when she's doing a piss-poor job of trying to distract them from the evil guns). Strangely, though the boat comes up several times in very blatant ways, we never actually see a boat and it disappears from the script as the action heats up.

Speaking of action, any time there's a chance of making things more wild or extreme, the scriptwriters took that opportunity to the max. Handguns? That's so typical of home invaders, let's try assault weapons. Why not stick a giant tank of fuel in an abandoned lakeside cottage so we can blow it up later? Could Ford's coworker secretly be working with the bad guys? Let's do it! (And then leave that entire subplot a confused and bloody mess later on with no explanation for what was actually going on.)

All-in-all, I give this film a ranking of six laptops out of ten. It leaves you feeling like you walked in late and missed all the introduction, then compresses three or four films' worth of action and thrills into an hour and a half, and then ends abruptly without tying up so many loose ends that you're wondering if the rest of the movie will come after the credits.

I'll start by saying that I haven't read the book that this movie was (apparently loosely) based on. Having seen documentaries on the fast food industry and mega-corporate culture before this, I went in expecting a film that exposed a lot of shocking secrets (well, "secrets" in as much as we probably ignore a lot of things that we're really aware of at some visceral level because it's easy to forget about bad things if you don't see them on a daily basis.)

Instead what came on the screen was a somewhat haphazard and rambling series of interconnected stories, telling the tale of various parts of a fictionalized fast food restaurant. We start with the story of a corporate higher-up (Greg Kinnear) who is sent to investigate reports of problems with contamination at his chain's meat supplier. We then cut to the story of some illegal immigrants crossing a desolate border from Mexico and getting taken to various parts of the country to find work. At this point the movie showed a lot of promise and expectation in terms of giving an important message about how our daily choices can affect many people in different ways.

However, from here we cut to an odd story about a high school girl (Ashley Johnson) working at the register of one of this chain's restaurants, who is dissatisfied with her low-pay dead-end work. Her story was by far the weakest link in the movie, and distracts greatly from the main point about how low prices lead to poor labor conditions beyond the sight of the consumer. It's this which leads to both economic disaster and environmental disaster as companies look to cut as many corners as they can to make an extra dime, be it by relaxing safety standards, paying sub-living-wages, or by ignoring health standards.

The movie jumps from story to story, with no solid resolution in many cases. The issue of poor labor practices with the illegal immigrants is glossed over, with only brief mention made to the lack of reliable health care, low relative pay, poor training & safety standards, and inability to report problems for fear of deportation that these workers face. Likewise, Greg Kinnear's character decides to do the right thing and report to his boss about the problems with the meat packing plant, but by some inexplicable bit of storytelling the person with connections to the plant essentially blackmails him (well, technically his boss, but strangely enough this also jeopardizes his job despite having just successfully developed a huge money-making product for the company.)

As mentioned earlier, by far the weakest part of the storyline follows Ashley Johnson's character, who suffers from a severe infestation of general white-trash-small-town-ism. Her mom (a very scary-looking Patricia Arquette) is basically a 40-going-on-16 skank. She's the prototypical beautiful-yet-mysteriously-unpopular girl at her high school. She hates her job and wants to "do good" and gets caught up with a bunch of the local college greenies, and things progress from there. Strangely, in a movie that's apparently trying to tell lots of sad moralistic tales about how people get forced to conform and fall into roles, she manages to do everything against the grain, yet gets off scot-free at the end.

In summary, you'd be better off reading The Jungle (meet the new century, same as the old century), read the book version of Fast Food Nation (which Kristin tells me is much more focused on the activist aspect of the woes barely touched on in the movie version), or visit your local meatpacking plant. This doesn't do any of them proper justice.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Big Macs.