Boy... the critics were right about this movie. What a bungled mess it turned out to be. The Postman, based on David Brin's acclaimed sci-fi novel, has somehow been turned into... a Hallmark Channel movie by Kevin Costner. The post-apocalyptic premise is genuinely captivating, but the movie's unfortunately full of tremendously hokey, saccharine, and corny scenes that are seemingly composed with a timid, unsure hand. These languid and lethargic scenes also combine to form a film that's three hours long, when Costner only seems to have devoted enough thought to fill up one hour's worth of script. On the bright side, the movie has been filmed with rather beautiful cinematography, and there are many sweeping shots of scenic vistas that evoke nature documentaries of the American Northwest.

Acting wise, I found Will Patton's General Bethlehem to be a great movie villain. He's got all the hallmarks of a modern age Hitler, but Patton also succeeds at subtly hinting at Bethlehem's past life as an unremarkable salesman. I'm only familiar with Patton's work as Captain Weaver in the show Falling Skies, and I can see now why they picked him for the show. The guy's fantastic at portraying a leader with a seemingly iron will, while hiding inner vulnerabilities from his men.

Kevin Costner never seems completely sure of himself as the Postman and gives a strangely halfhearted performance. His attempts at delivering humor in the rare instances where it's available completely fall flat, such as when he announces that all dogs must be leashed, or when he states that residents must claim their mail at the bottom of a dam, after climbing up a steep flight of stairs to the top of the dam where the town is. The legend around the Postman grows and he eventually attracts an entire outpost full of eager young mail carriers who would die for the mail, yet you never understand why because Costner's sketchy performance never gives the heft or gravitas or personality necessary to make it believable. Olivia Williams is more of a sure presence in the movie and she does an admirable job of presenting a tough frontier woman, but sadly she's saddled with terrible lines of dialogue, with the winner being "You give out hope like it was candy in your pocket" which can't help but induce groans. In movies, you're supposed to show, don't tell, so I can't understand why Costner felt it necessary to tell us so forcefully the entire message of the movie.

Part of the problem with the movie's runtime is that the entire first act is completely unnecessary and could have been discarded without any loss. It's nothing more than the experiences of the Postman being a prisoner/forced conscript in Bethlehem's army. This seems to be solely so we can see how terrible Bethlehem is. Well... that's not needed, since we can clearly see how terrible Bethlehem is in the next two acts of the film, where he butchers and rapes innocent villagers. And the few characters the Postman meets in this beginning act are all completely wasted and killed off at the end of the act, so they don't even factor into the remaining film.

The lowest point of the movie is the ending, where we get some inane ceremony scene in the future where they unveil a bronze statue to the Postman, positioned on horseback grabbing a piece of mail from an eager young boy. It's a reenactment of a previous scene where he nabbed the mail from a boy, yet it's so perfectly captured that I struggle to understand how they could have gotten every detail right. Then a man in the audience tearfully chokes and utters "I was that boy!" Oh brother... like it wasn't obvious enough. Thanks for clarifying it for the dullards in the theater. The whole scene is heavy handed, maudlin pap that belongs on the Hallmark Channel and feels completely unworthy of being in a serious post-apocalyptic story. When Roger Ebert reviewed The Natural, he complained that it was simply "idolatry on behalf of Robert Redford." I disagree with Roger about that one, but I do think that's a perfect way of summarizing The Postman. The movie is simply idolatry on behalf of Kevin Costner.

4/10