Not a great film, despite what you may have heard. And I guess that all depends upon what you're expecting.
It's not an out and out thriller. Nor is it an out and out romantic story.
True, it has elements of both, but for me it was a bit of a mess, spoiled - or made, depending on your view - by the two major jumps in the story, which turned it into three stories.
Each element is connected by the children of Ryan Gosling, who plays a motorcycle stunt rider traveling around with a circus; Eva Mendes, a struggling single mother; and Bradley Cooper, a rookie cop who halts Gosling's side career as a Bank robber. Ray Liotta shows up to do his usual 'bad cop' routine, a role that he must be as tired of performing as I am of watching.
The abruptness by which that story jumps from Gosling, to Cooper, and then by fifteen years to their children meeting via weed, ecstasy and OxyContin to an "every son follows his destiny" type of ending broke the whole thing up a little too much for me, especially when each time I felt the story was just getting into its stride.
My wife didn't like the story jumps either, but for a completely different reason. She said she only really enjoyed the first third - basically any scene that featured Ryan Gosling.
I doubt she'll be taking over from Roger Ebert as the nation's premier film critic now that he has sadly passed.
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