A fantastic date with fate
The Adjustment Bureau (12A)
Verdict: A very offbeat romance
Rating: 
The Adjustment Bureau may look like a sci-fi action thriller along the lines of the previous films based on Philip K. Dick stories, Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.
Judged by those standards, it’s only fair-to-middling. Where it scores is as something else: a romantic drama that presents us with one of the most likeable couples in recent cinema.
Matt Damon gives his most charming performance yet as David Norris, a rising young New York politician who suffers an electoral setback after an embarrassing tabloid revelation.
Damon and Blunt: A modern Romeo and Juliet
On the night of his public humiliation, he meets a young Englishwoman, Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt).
He finds her intelligent, ironic and enchanting. Fortunately for the film, so does the audience. After the horror of Gulliver’s Travels, it’s a welcome return to form for Blunt; who is even more delightful here than she was in The Young Victoria.
David encounters Elise again on a bus not long afterwards, and it seems as though fate is driving them together. However, the reverse is true.
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Fate — in the form of fedora-wearing Harry Mitchell (Anthony Mackie) — has the job of keeping them apart. He’s a none-too-efficient part of the Adjustment Bureau, a mysterious body charged with ensuring that the ‘right’ people reach the top.
David learns he is destined to become U.S. President, but only if he doesn’t end up with Elise. He has to make the ultimate choice between love and his career.
Writer-director George Nolfi does a good job of making the rules of his universe reasonably transparent, and he’s cleverly raised the stakes from Dick’s original short story; where David was a lowly insurance salesman and there was no romantic interest.
Though never as flashy as Christopher Nolan was with Inception, Nolfi and his excellent cinematographer John Toll (Gone Baby Gone, Almost Famous, Braveheart) make wonderfully creative use of New York locations in the climactic chase scene, which has a surreal intensity.
The film isn’t perfect. The writing of Elise is sparkier in the early scenes than towards the end, when she becomes a rather too passive damsel in distress. The film lacks a twist and its discussion of free will versus pre-destination is pedestrian.
Where the film does work — terrifically well — is as an offbeat romance, a modern take on Romeo and Juliet.
Damon is touchingly troubled as a star-crossed lover wondering how far he can be in control of his own destiny. He and Blunt have that rarity in modern cinema: romantic chemistry. If you are in the mood for a charming, intelligent love story, I don’t think you will be disappointed.
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