There is a brash, surreal, out-the-box vibe to Braid that I have to appreciate, but it's hard to ignore the amateurish aspects which make it feel more like a B-movie, whether it's the uneven acting, bratty characters, unstable tone, and almost random attempts to be edgy and experimental.
I absolutely love overt weirdness in movies, but I also believe there must be a solid vision to be able to employ it successfully. What makes surrealism work or not, is perhaps down to personal taste, and since it becomes clear very early on that the director has every intent of sabotaging a 'normal' telling of this story, one then has to rely on intuition as a guide.
My problem is that despite watching with full attention, my intuition kept telling me that this whole ordeal is bupkis. As it devolved into predictably violent terrain, with a poorly drawn detective character, the film began to feel less intelligent, and deliberately inchoate, as though its director put this whole thing together during a manic coke binge.
Instead of the pleasure of watching little pieces of brilliance come together like pieces of a dream, I was simply lost very early on, and when I submitted to that loss, I was bored. There are moments of crazed greatness here, but they are unfortunately not well enough sustained, and arrive along with a mixed bag of scenes and characters that don't amount to a whole lot.
