“The Adjustment Bureau” was a film that always held a lot of promise. Based, like “Blade Runner” and “Total Recall,” on a story by legendary sci-fi author Philip K Dick, it marked the directorial debut of “The Bourne Ultimatum” writer George Nolfi, and featured a top-notch cast, led by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, with John Slattery, Anthony Mackie, Terence Stamp and Shohreh Aghdashloo joining them.
The plot involves Damon’s senatorial candidate falling for a ballet dancer (Blunt) he meets by chance, only to be confronted by a group of mysterious men who tell him that their encounter was never meant to happen, and terrible consequences will result if the relationship is allowed to develop.
But with a badly cut trailer hitting last summer, failing to make the plot look anything other than silly, and the release date slipping from a key summer slot this year, to this September, to next March, the film’s begun to look like something of an albatross around Universal‘s neck, and things aren’t helped by the pair of new posters that debuted overnight.
Both use the ‘be afraid of people in hats’ motif that dominated the trailer, with shadows of Roger Sterling and his pals looming over the city as Damon and Blunt run away from them. Unfortunately, the one-sheet, courtesy of Cinema Blend, features the two stars in a hilarious ‘fake running’ pose, but it’s at least better than the quad, as seen above, via Empire, which, thanks to the shonky use of perspective, makes the film look more like a movie version of “Land of the Giants” than a Dick adaptation.
We’re still keen to see it — for one thing, the early months of the year are so barren for grown-up entertainment that we’ll sort of take what we can get. And we do like the talent involved, and the premise is certainly intriguing: we just hope that the execution is stronger than what the marketing materials have so far suggested. We’ll find out for sure when the film opens on March 4th.