Think the title is long? Consider yourself warned: this boring movie never seems to end, meandering for nearly 2½ hours. Plus it commits the deadly sin of assuming that the viewer is familiar with the particulars of Jesse James’ early legend, without which the poorly told story has no narrative foundation.
Brad Pitt fails to inspire dread, awe or respect as Jesse James, leaving a huge vacuum at the core of the movie. Casey Affleck, so good in Gone, Baby, Gone, here has little to play off and so fizzles out. The rest of the cast is wasted in this long mess of a movie.
The structure of this overlong film just didn’t work. Extensive voice-over narration and frequent cutting between parallel plot lines made it emotionally distant at best.