Sure mate.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD (2006) - **1/2

Like Johnny Depp and the ever-growing Christian Bale, Matt Damon is the confident and fearless actor, who also happens to be a movie star, for our age that Dustin Hoffman and pre-smoked-out Al Pacino served in the 1970s. Unlike his buddy Ben Affleck, Damon carefully picked his projects, took his time to stardom and outright street respect. Affleck choose the quick movie star route.

Guess who's career crashed and burned hard?

I say this because Matt Damon really carries the noble shipwreck that is THE GOOD SHEPHERD on his shoulders, and really dominates the film's soul.

Its just a pity that the script and DeNiro the director failed to match up with Damon's superb work.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD has such a great drama template to work with. Tell the tale of the CIA's birth, write about a whole generation of American intelligence officers who sacrificed their morality, their families, their lives in performing quite horrible things in the faint hope that their bad deeds will be redeemed with a much better world.

Instead, we get a melodramatic written in a contrived fashion, with the piss-poor dramatic physics that just fail. Hero knocks up a girl, and he has to marry her. His daddy blew his brains out. He shot a few people up for Uncle Sam. Can't you just hear the violins by now?

You know what writer Eric Roth and director DeNiro should have done instead? They have a good idea, and a good enough narrative ringer(flashbacks intercutting inbetween the Bay of Pigs disaster of 1961), so here is what I would have done.

Keep Damon as a prominent blueblood Yale man, who happens to discover that one of his teachers is a Nazi sympathizer and possible spy(since this would be the late 1930s, when there were a substantial minority of Americans that dug what Adolph was doing) and thus he commits his own investigating, in a Hardy Boys fashion, until the government recruits him.

Thus, Damon starts down his path of doing spywork and intelligence for his beloved country. We then cut to him during WW2, where he is a OSS officer with a good record. He becomes one of the pillars of the new CIA and we witness all the damn insanity between 1945 and 1961: Guatamela, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam.

Meanwhile, he had married and had a kid, but instead of the contrived house melodrama bullshit with Jolie, he loses that family because he sacrifices them. Yet in his son, who he sees as the possible redemption for his own failures and sins, he has to save...

THE GOOD SHEPHERD isn't a bad film. Its just a wobbledy movie that really doesn't know what to say, and considering that Eric Roth's script was described as "phone book-size", then with the massive rewriting and film editing by DeNiro, we have a cool ship with a major hole in the hull.