Zero Dark Thirty is getting rave reviews, but it’s really not a good movie. There is probably a good story buried in there somewhere, but the structuring of information in the film is so poor that you really only come away with a superficial, broad-brush tale – they tortured people, got information, no one listened to the girl, and then she was right in the end. Throw in a lot of scenes of water torture, some dull surveillance sequences, and a final quarter filled with nothing but military jargon, guns, fancy helicopters and guys in desert fatigues yelling “GET DOWN! GET DOWN!” and there you have it – your typical overrated future Oscar nominee.

I think Jessica Chastain is a fantastic actress, one of the absolute elite, but her performance in this movie struck me as really bizarre and ineffective – it must be a combination of the (lack of) dialog and the way she was directed, because her prior body of work suggests she can play almost anything convincingly. I didn’t even believe she was CIA. She plays the character like some kind of annoying, spastic brat. Obviously this was a huge disappointment, since I went to the movie largely because she was in it. The fellow who really was excellent was Jason Clarke, playing the main U.S. torture guy – he’s fabulous. The always formidable Jennifer Ehle is also solidly good here, and because Chastain’s scenes are usually shared with one or both of them, this only emphasizes her weird, awkward performance. (In fairness, they both had much better dialog to speak than did Chastain.) By the way, I don’t know why Joel Edgerton is listed as a star – he’s hardly in the movie, and has almost no lines.

When I walked out of the theater, I stared comparing Zero Dark Thirty (unfavorably) to Fair Game, but really it’s not good enough to justify any comparison to that masterpiece. Let’s set the bar lower: how does it compare to Argo? It can’t shine Argo’s shoes, basically, and I say this as someone very aware of Argo’s flaws and limitations. Sense of place and location is much stronger in Argo. The set-up is much stronger in Argo. Dramatic action scenes are structured and filmed much better in Argo. Even though Argo was a much simpler story, it feels deeper and more satisfying because it’s so much better written. And even though Ben Affleck’s character is pretty much a mystery man, I came away with a better sense of who he was than I did for Jessica Chastain’s character, largely because Affleck’s performance is (gasp) better.

I will say this about Zero Dark Thirty: It’s a very slick film, and that plus its irreproachable topic and the recent Oscar pedigree of its director virtually guarantees that the critics will fall in line behind it. It’s so slick it seems better than it actually is while you’re watching it; only afterward does it dawn on you what a structural mess it was, how unbelievable the main character was, and how much of the story you just went with on artificial momentum. But no matter how slicked-up this messy film is, it’s still just a mess, one that you would never, ever need or want to experience again.