The Good Shepherd (15)

Given its cold-fish flavour, it’s no surprise that Robert De Niro’s second directorial stint didn’t round up audiences. It’s long and it takes itself very seriously, Eric Roth’s (Forrest Gump, The Insider) script baring the brunt of its prestige-pic solemnity. The icicle-cold centre for its 22-year sweep through CIA history is Matt Damon’s Edward Wilson, but this isn’t Bourne again. It’s about the behind-the-scenes boys, men in hats and coats sitting in burnished-wood rooms, who trust no one and are so frozen with paranoia even Angelina Jolie couldn’t stir them.

Oddly, it’s this ‘dull’ stuff that grips. The Good Shepherd opens up a covert world, explored with a probing eye that almost manages to do for counterintelligence what Goodfellas did for the mob. The problems set in at home. Jolie’s token whinging-wife role ain’t no Mrs Smith and, after a tender scene in which the Wilsons’ child piddles himself, the emotions attached to said son’s dramatic arc fall flat. Even Damon seems less like a study in work-wearied restraint than someone struggling to nail a character.

In the end, that’s the film’s problem. The lack of emotion in The Good Shepherd doesn’t come from the laudable seriousness given to the subject matter, but from its tunnel-vision. Worth a first look but with few hidden depths and a sparse disc (16 minutes of dead-weight deleted scenes make up the only extras), it’s tough to  recommend a revisit.

DVD Extras:

Deleted scenes

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