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you have no real love for.

Not everything about the movie is dull, there is this amazing beauty in its filmmaking, take Brad Pitt for example even though he is played by another actor during his earliest (oldest) years you can always see Pitts face in the character. It's a marvel of cinema that will be the only reason the movie acquires any long term recognition. Pitt himself looks both older and younger than we have ever seen him before, its particularly interesting seeing him age from a forty year old man down to a teenager, with all the lines gone.

Another masterstroke of the movie is the detail with which the story is told, you see the difficulties that occur as your life is told backwards, as the character essentially goes through puberty twice. Watching all the characters get older while Benjamin gets younger also causes a number of issues.

Sadly there is no magic to the movie, there is no real joy, nothing to give you those warm feelings that all those classic out of the ordinary love stories offer the viewer, it's a grim dark movie that will lose all impact with the youthful audiences. Something more curious than the title is how for 140 minutes the movie you are lead to believe this is a family movie, then in the last twenty minutes that wonderful F word pops up to ruin any possibilities of it being for the family.

There is a great cast bought together for the movie, relative newcomer Taraji P. Henson is joined by some solid heavyweight performers; Cate Blanchette, Tilda Swinton, Julia Ormand, Jared Harris, and Elias Koteas. But despite its high calibre the only people you care about are Henson as Queenie and Pitt as Benjamin, the two love interests are lacking substance and any real likeability.

The movie does offer some light humour, but on the whole is something far duller than you could ever believe it to be, and sadly far longer than you would like. The last ninety minutes of the movie are so painfully slow, that you will feel like any joy garnered in the first sixty minutes just disappears into the ether.

There is nothing extraordinary about Benjamin Button, and to some level you may well come away finding your life far more interesting.

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