What's wrong with GERRY is obvious from the very first scene . A car drives down a road in New Mexico and the camera holds the shot , and holds , and holds , and holds and keeps holding the shot . This is what is known as " shot length " where the camera doesn't cut to another shot . The average shot length according to film critic David Bordwell was between 8 and 11 seconds from 1930 to 1960 while in the 1970s it was between 5 and 8 seconds while at the turn of the century it had shortened to 3 to 6 seconds . There's exactly 100 shots in GERRY a film that lasts for 100 minutes . If your arithmetic is really bad then let me explain that the average shot length is one minute which is 20 times longer than the average film from the same period . What makes this even worse is down to the fact that there's very little happening narrative wise . The premise involves two blokes called Gerry getting lost in the New Mexico desert and what makes this film even more unbearable is that there's often a lack of dialogue . So you've got two young men trekking through the desert not saying much making the ridiculous shot length seem even more longer than it actually is
There's something else that bugged me and that is Gerry and Gerry walk through some woodland early in the film . Think about that for a moment , they walk through some woodland in to a desert . If they're walking at a pace of perhaps three miles an hour then if they walked for about four hours then they'd be about twelve miles away from this woodland . Surely they'd still be able to make visual contact with the woodland ? We're also shown that the woodland they came from is relatively busy with families enjoying a nature ramble . Are we to consider that all of sudden the eponymous characters walk into a land based version of The Bermuda Triangele ? At no point would a relatively intelligent audience be fooled in to taking this premise seriously and while you need a suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy a great number of films there's nothing here that will make you buy in to the premise . If the characters had taken some flying lessons and the plane had crashed then this would be a more sensible way to set up the story but seems beyond the ability of authors Damon and Affleck to come with a stronger reason to set up the story I suppose you could praise Matt Damon and say that he doesn't want to be known simply for his hunky action star roles and while this might be true it's not really like he's stretching himself in this movie , I mean how much talent do you need to walk , and walk , and walk . Even if Ben Afflek had been cast instead of his brother Casey there's no way GERRY could possibly be a less unentertaining movie
There's something else that bugged me and that is Gerry and Gerry walk through some woodland early in the film . Think about that for a moment , they walk through some woodland in to a desert . If they're walking at a pace of perhaps three miles an hour then if they walked for about four hours then they'd be about twelve miles away from this woodland . Surely they'd still be able to make visual contact with the woodland ? We're also shown that the woodland they came from is relatively busy with families enjoying a nature ramble . Are we to consider that all of sudden the eponymous characters walk into a land based version of The Bermuda Triangele ? At no point would a relatively intelligent audience be fooled in to taking this premise seriously and while you need a suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy a great number of films there's nothing here that will make you buy in to the premise . If the characters had taken some flying lessons and the plane had crashed then this would be a more sensible way to set up the story but seems beyond the ability of authors Damon and Affleck to come with a stronger reason to set up the story I suppose you could praise Matt Damon and say that he doesn't want to be known simply for his hunky action star roles and while this might be true it's not really like he's stretching himself in this movie , I mean how much talent do you need to walk , and walk , and walk . Even if Ben Afflek had been cast instead of his brother Casey there's no way GERRY could possibly be a less unentertaining movie