Pretty awful and stupid.

Long and Boring. Very predictable, and annoying.You do not give a damn about what happens to the main characters, or rather wish the film ended.

What an egregious waste of time. Between the ad hoc character development and awesomely pathetic lines, this movie caused me to blurt out, Ignatius J Reilly style, on more than one occasion. Two key excerpts: Kidman to Penn: "What to you do when you can't sleep at night?" Penn to Kidman, after thoughtful pause: "I stay awake." And another: "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief." Gross!

This film takes the thrill out of thriller. It is a tedious snorefest. Sean Penn is a glum action star and Nicole Kidmon suffers with hair and accent issues. One exciting bus scene enveloped inside a trite talkfest equals the big yawn.

It sucks very dissapointed Very slow moving.

This movie sucked. I a poor escuse for a thriller.

Boring boring boring. my god, stilted acting, predictable!!! and just plain i could barely sit through it it was so bloody boring.

A vaguely well-intentioned mess. Great work from Sean Penn, but there were moments when even he couldn't overcome the clumsy, trite dialogue.

Mediocre, cliched and not particularly thrilling. Nicole Kidman is hot. Sean Penn's acting was laughable, he is a ham.

Like watching "The Bourne Identity" in slo-motion... This so-called thriller crawled like a koala... Neither Kidman nor Penn played likable characters, the plot was cliched, and you will forget you ever saw it in six months.

Holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through. Honestly one of the worst movies I have ever seen, as it falls apart within the first 10 minutes. Two guys talking about an assasination attempt in the freaking U.N. assembly room??? GREAT idea! Yeah, that's a safe bet! And how the hell did they have access to the building after hours anyway? And why were the mics turned on so Nicole Kidman can hear what they are saying? Very well thought out! These two must be master assasins. Best is the end, though. There is an assasination attempt on this dude speaking at the UN so the place goes bananas, he's rushed away by bodyguards like it' the end of the world but of course [Ed: Spoiler omitted....] Brilliant! Piece of crap.… Expand

Even though i am huge fan of politcal thrillers, i found this ridiculously bad. it may have had its heart in the right place but the writing was atrocious, the acting was mediocre and the direction was stagnant. i feel sorry for sean penn.

Tries too hard. Not very suspenseful. Definately not a thriller. Subject matter that seems interesting at first quickly turns boring. While not terrible, the acting was nothing special at all. One of the worst Sean Penn movies I've seen in a while.

With high expectations, i was left pretty flat with this one. The acting was excellent from Penn and Kidman. Keener was given nothing to work with. The only great scene was bus sequence. There were holes in it and it was quite predictable, up to the very end, which was pretty bad.

I've seen worse.

This movie had all the elements needed in a suspense thriller, minus the suspense and the thrills. It was boring, predictable, and too melodramatic. What a waste of acting talent.

Boring, non thriller. Mediocre like most of the films of 2005 so far. Got really tired of Sean Penn's whiny character.

Saying that this mostly pedestrian, questionably cast and rotely directed topical thriller of Big Important Ideas is Sydney Pollack's best work of the past twenty years isn't much of a compliment, considering that his post-Out of Africa output includes such unfiltered sewage as Havana, Sabrina and Random Hearts. Pollack's postcard depiction of The Big Apple still shows that he can give good travelogue, and the last 20 minutes feature enough standoffs, showdowns and twists to hoodwink some into thinking they've seen a GOOD suspense movie, but being released just a few months after Hotel Rwanda, a far more honest and penetrating examination of some of the themes this treats so superficially gives The Interpreter even less justification for existing. Nicole Kidman woodenly plays a United Nations interpreter who overhears what may be an assassination attempt on a despotic African dictator; while never being my favorite actress, and having won one of the most undeserved Oscars ever as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, she had since redeemed herself with a lacerating performance in Dogville and a sparkling comic one in The Stepford Wives, but here is back to her old tricks again: substituting a meticulous accent for a portrayal while never letting anything resembling an emotion pass across that porcelain face of hers. As for Sean Penn, assigned to protect (and investigate) her, I won't argue too strongly with those who believe that he's this generation's greatest actor; he often is, but I think he's miscast here: even with his character's tragic backstory, the nervous twitchiness that served him well in Mystic River, 21 Grams and many others is discomfortingly out of place. (Nothing wrong with casting against type, but who would YOU rather see as a cop entrusted with YOUR life: John Wayne or James Dean?) However, the wonderful Catherine Keener is absolutely the real deal as Penn's world-weary partner; the lines she's given may not be much more inspired than "Here's the file you were looking for" but she delivers them with a blend of cynicism and compassion that's as authentic as the Lieutenant Columbo coat she seems to live in. Original screenwriter Charles Randolph previously did the provocative Life of David Gale, which I may have been one of the five people in the known universe to have actually liked; it was an anti-capital punishment drama that was courageous and honest enough to admit that sometimes good people working toward admirable ends sometimes accomplish them by unscrupulous means; if The Interpreter had any similarly bold or original ideas, you can bet that they were flattened to mush during the rewrites. (Sorry, folks, "genocide is bad, but political assassination isn't any better" doesn't quite cut it.) Then again, The Interpreter's blithe assumption that the U.N. is the best problem solver since Dear Abby is, in a time in our nation's history when,for whatever childish, misguided or wrongheaded reasons, dismantling or pulling out of the U.N. is the only alternative that and more Americans can see to its general ineffectiveness, is just a prime example of The Interpreter's stock in trade: a bland, naively wide-eyed look at the world that represents liberalism at its weakest, and as a result keeps getting Republicans reelected to high office and affixing that permanent smirk to Ann Coulter's face. (Then again, what would you expect from a director who, in making Havana an unofficial remake of Casablanca, actually parallelled Castro's thugs with the World War II Resistance movement?) The Interpreter, whose low point is a terrorist attack on a piece of New York City public transportation that's staged and shot so impersonally that it's insensitive and offensive, may pretend to be asking lots of fundamental questions, but ultimately the only one that matters is: "What's the Ku translation of 'Sydney, go back to your acting career--in other people's films' ?"… Expand

Sydney Pollack has found a cure for insomniacs.