I had this sitting in my watch list for a while because while the concept sounded good, I watch a lot of low-budget films, and it had the potential to be either something worth watching or just a hunk of boring and poorly executed junk.
I think the concept is something many people can relate to, being a nice person, BUT being a terrible judge of other's character and/or being far too trusting of others so much so you cannot seem to find decent people to be associate with. This is a philosophical film, how do you know how to judge people's character rightly? Can you possibly know that someone wont screw you over later? Are people all good or all bad? How long do you have to know someone before you can judge their character? Why do people habitually choose bad people to be in their life? If we focus so much on other people, and stop looking at our own flaws do we bring our own downfall? How do we build our intuition on how to know who to trust and what to trust them with? The problem is, the script telegraphs everything in advance and explains it's philosophical underpinnings rather than letting the audience chew on them and come to their own conclusions, in other words, it is just to ham-fisted to be truly effective the way that it wants to be.
The script is fairly clever in showing a person who cannot exercise good judgement, and the movie does well to point out we all make judgements, something people try to avoid these days by saying "Don't judge me!", which in and of itself is a judgement.... I cannot tell you how many people I have met who do the same things the main character does, and in that regard the script does very well at showing a person who cannot and refuses to learn to use good judgement and trust people blindly for various reasons.
The execution is not as good as it could be, there is a far too long facial and hair cut scene, could have been 20 seconds and had the same effect. The script is decent, but a little too heavy handed and very uneven, and it sometimes drags in places, this would be a lot better if it was trimmed down to about 80 minutes to trim down some of the filler. While I don't generally mind it when movies don't use a lot of music, this is one case where some more music would have really helped the lack of music makes the pace drag as the movie moves along, especially since the pace goes from brisk to plodding about halfway through and becomes a lot more predictable and the downfall is hard to watch. The music when used, is well-done, but there really should have been more of it.
I can't complain about the sound, it is generally well-done, there are not any major fluctuations in sound. Again, the acting is uneven, the lead at first is very wooden, but gets a bit better as the movie progresses. The two angels, while funny, are the weakest actors here. I wish the camera work was a little more steady, it isn't shaky, but it does move around a lot, and it is a bit distracting, and I don't know why they filmed it this way, it is just a bit odd.
I would recommend this to people who don't mind low budget films that are a bit moralizing and philosophical, it could be more whimsical, but to be fair, it does deal with some weighty subject matter. I would recommend this if you are out of things to watch, and don't mind a movie with the flaws I mentioned above.
