Espionage epic, reasonably described by one blurbist as "The Godfather of CIA movies," but only if you are satisfied to retain all the pretentiousness of The Godfather, right down to the oppressive underillumination, and do without any of the enlivening pyrotechnics. (Despite those subtractions, the movie still comes to within ten minutes or so of The Godfather's nearly three-hour duration.) Tremendously unentertaining, it slogs back and forth in time, beginning with, and regularly returning to, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and fallout, but retreating back as far as the protagonist's college days as a Yalie and an inductee into the Skull and Bones secret society in 1939 (and even, in a psychoanalytical flashback-within-a-flashback, as far as his boyhood and his father's suicide in 1925), and then working its way forward toward 1961 in incremental jumps. Second-time director Robert De Niro, who also has a small sedentary role as the protagonist's espionage mentor, may have convinced himself that the back-and-forth time shuttle (not to mention the Cuban connection) would transform this also into The Godfather II of CIA movies. But this, unlike that, is a single-generation narrative, and the continual interruptions in the storytelling serve little other purpose than to thwart any suspense. And since the block-of-wood Matt Damon hardly ages a day in twenty-plus years (nor does Angelina Jolie in the unaccustomed role of a neglected wife), our best hope to avoid confusion as to where we are on the timeline is to differentiate between his many eyeglass frames. Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd