Parkland (2013) Directed by Peter Landesman

Everybody more or less assumed that this was going to be a good and interesting movie, considering its subject and the approach to it, myself included. However, the end result is far from anything great or interesting, shockingly enough!

This movie is going for a realistic and insightful approach, only problem is that this never feels like a realistic or insightful movie. It feels like a telling of events but without any emotions or heart behind any of it. It instead feels like a very shallow movie, that isn't telling anything new or ever dares to go deep into things.

It feels very random with all of the people that it's following. It doesn't have one main character in it, so to speak and therefor it feels that it's lacking focus as well. Besides, are all of these people really worth following? Surely there were some far more interesting people to follow, on that fateful day when Kennedy was assassinated.

This really truly is a movie that still could have worked out but it's Peter Landesman's directing that prevents this movie from ever turning into anything good or interesting to watch. I'm sorry to say but the directing is quite horrible at times! For instance the way the Kennedy assassination itself was shown in this movie....my goodness, it felt like I was watching a bad comedy skit. It's all very obvious that this was Peter Landesman's directorial debut and he just didn't know how to set up, tell and show certain things. I really believe that a more experienced director still would have been able to make something good out of this movie and who knows, maybe Peter Landesman will turn out to be a great director someday but with this movie he really doesn't impress much yet.

It also really doesn't matter or changes much about this movie that it stars some big name actors in it. Sure, they are all still great actors (well, most of them) but none of them ever gets anything interesting to do and their characters, that are of course all based on real life persons, remain some very shallow ones, since we basically learn nothing about their lives or personalities, by watching them in this movie.

This is a pretty pointless movie in my opinion, made to impress and to provide some new insightful information, by telling things from different perspectives. But it completely misses the mark, by being a very flat movie instead, that never feels realistic, emotional or interesting enough for you to invest yourself in this movie.

4/10

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