Movie Review: The Soloist

Sometimes a movie tries to do to much. Tries to be bigger than it really should be. The Soloist is an excellent example of this. On the surface, it should be great. Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr.? Great, right? Wrong. The movie about a mentally imbalanced celloist and the reporter who discovers him and brings him to the attention of a city ends up feeling pretentious and too darn long. It’s almost 2 hours, and it maybe had an hour and a half of good material in there. Perhaps if they’d gone for shorter, it would have worked better. The biggest problem is that it just tried to throw too much in there: personal conflicts, a message about the homeless, multiple character arcs, bits about newspaper writing–everything but the kitchen sink. Flooded by all those Messages, they all sort of canceled each other out. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it wasn’t a good one, either. Two stars, but not really worth your time.