Matt Damon in 'The Adjustment Bureau' Wears a Magic Hat in a Philip K. Dick-Plotted Potboiler

Matt Damon's new movie, "The Adjustment Bureau," employs an intriguing trailer, which I'll discuss further in a moment. It is based on a Philip K. Dick short story "Adjustment Team."

Philip K. Dick, who died in 1982, has had 9 of his short stories or novels adapted for the screen, including "Blade Runner," "Total Recall," "Minority Report," "A Scanner Darkly" and other such classic science fiction tales. His stories often have monopolistic government bureaucracies or grapple with issues beyond just sci-fi concerns, including drug use, science, government run amok and philosophy.

It's hard to "diss" a Philip K. Dick-based plot, especially if you are aware that, in 2007, he became the first science fiction writer to be included in the Library of America series. There are other science fiction writers as good as Dick (Asimov, Bradbury, Pohl come to mind immediately), but he's not to be taken lightly. He had a noteworthy output of 44 novels and 121 short stories during a life and career lived in near-poverty. Movies are still being made from his over-the-top creative ideas, 29 years after his death.

How Writer/Director George Nolfi (co-writer of "The Bourne Ultimatum" and current writer of the "Hawaii 5-0" television series) managed to form a cast that has Matt Damon as its star, Emily Blunt as the love interest, John Slattery ("Mad Men") and Terence Stamp as two of the "bad guys" is a question that could be answered, but not by me.Good going on that front!

I'm still working out the reasons why this movie, drawn from such promising source material,went down the tubes into unbelievable-land. And quickly.

Was it the writing, you ask?

No, the writing---as far as the dialogue goes, courtesy of Director Nolfi---is crisp, believable and sharp, as when Damon, smitten by Emily Blunt, says to her on a bus, "I was defenseless against the short skirt. It's a belt, really." The pair seem charming together.

Did the romance not work? No, the romance worked, because Damon has that sincere neotonic All-American boy look and Blunt has that great British accent and, really...what's not to like?. Sincerity oozes from Damon's every pore, even when you wonder what he was telling the real Mrs. Damon at home nights about what the plot had him doing and saying while this film was shooting.(I can just hear Matt Damon discussing it candidly with Clint Eastwood, for instance.)

Did Emily Blunt not bring it? No, Blunt was good as the girlfriend, (although I wasn't buying her role as a ballet dancer who is to become the Toast of the Town.)

Was the budget inadequate for such an ambitious film, with splendiforous interiors of everything from Yankee Stadium to the men's bathroom at the Waldorf Astoria? No, it appeared that no expense had been spared to bring this story about true love to the screen with elegance and style.

So, what went wrong?

Answer: many things.

One thing that went wrong was the plot device of using magic hats. Yes, magic hats. Magic hats unlock secret doors that allow superior beings to navigate more easily in New York City. I had just watched "The Celebrity Apprentice" teams, [led by Richard Hatch of "Survivor" fame and Star Jones, formerly of "The View"] attempt to deliver pizzas in New York City. In Star Jones' team's case, they lost out on a $35,000 donation from a local fire station because New York City traffic did not allow them to deliver the pizzas in time. I'll bet both teams would have liked some of "them tha'r Magic Hats." Maybe Philip K. Dick did write the story with magic hats, but I'm convinced that a more modernized item would have worked better...perhaps a computer chip. Or, silly me, what about a key or a laser-like pointer thing-ie, like we all use to turn our TV sets on and off. But a hat?

Wow! That takes me back to Gene Autry time and Tobor the Robot on black-and-white TV.

And then there was the "Don't turn the doorknob clockwise" bit. It was all just a bit old-time-y and antique. As someone else put it so eloquently, "It just didn't fly, Orville."

If you're going to have a film that posits the theory that there is an Adjustment Team that is setting our course in life, a team From Above, one supposes, that answers to "The Chairman" (who, I gather, would be equivalent to our anthropomorphic concept of God), well...let's just say that Magic Hats might fly with a 5-year-old, but this film is not advertised as being a film for children. It's a movie about true love and how the enduring nature of true love can save you and save the world. Or something like that.

We all know from the previews that Damon, an aspiring politician, enters his office one day to find the Adjustment Team at work. John Slattery tells him, "You've just seen behind a curtain that you weren't even supposed to know existed." If Damon tells anyone about the Adjustment Team, they threaten to "change your mind for you." ("We deploy a recalibration." "The Chairman has the plan. We only see part of it.")

Only problem (Huge Plot Conflict), Damon has been told never again to meet with the Girl of his Dreams (played by Emily Blunt as Elise Sellas). What the ads try to pitch as "a thriller" is really much more an old-fashioned romance, as David Norris (Matt Damon) tells the Adjustment Bureau, "All I have is the choices that I make. And I choose her. Come what may." David insists, in arguing with the Bureau, that mankind has "free will," but the Adjustment Bureau men correct him, saying, "You have the appearance of free will."

To be honest, when the film opened, I got chills running up and down my spine. It looked like it was going to rival Robert Redford's 1972 film "The Candidate," where Redford played Bill McKay, a candidate running for political office. If only it had kept on that realistic track with a new treatment that shows how candidates are "packaged." At the showing of "The Candidate" back in the '70s, you even got a button with Redford's picture on it that said, "Bill McKay: A Better Way." (I recently read that Ethel Kennedy, whose husband Robert lost his life to his job at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, told Redford that she didn't like "The Candidate" at all, because she and her family considered politics to be a higher calling.)

Whatever the case, I liked the set-up that David Norris (Matt Damon) was a young up-and-coming politician who was going to set the world on fire. And I loved his speech to the masses when he lost his first election and told the truth about "image" in elections. And I didn't even mind the way the romantic duo "meet cute" in the men's room of the Waldorf Astoria.

It was after that point that things went horribly awry. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." ((William Butler Yeats)

I can see how this may have worked on the page, with scripted lines like, "You can't outrun your fate," and "Whatever it takes," but, onscreen, there are so many hokey things that even an actor as skillful as Matt Damon struggled mightily (the magic hat bit, for one example). The premise is "out there," as they used to say of the truth on "The X-Files." The plot could have been plucked from "The Twilight Zone."

As a viewer, I have a lot of unanswered questions, which, as a reviewer, I cannot repeat here for fear of revealing too much of what you, the reader, may not yet have seen. My advice: be prepared to be disappointed, as a modern, savvy movie-goer who probably isn't going to be swept away with the idea of angels from on high (a la Nicolas Cage in "City of Angels") guiding we mere mortals here below.

I liked some (not all, but some) of the dialogue, and the actors performed well in the parts they were given. I'm simply wondering if, sometimes, a movie released in 2011 can be just a bit too faithful to source material that is over 30 years old depicting a future world that I didn't buy into for one second.