A chronicle of a young man's rise to power in Paris via his manipulation of the city's wealthiest and most influential women. Bel Ami is for sure not the greatest film i've ever seen but i was surprised by the whole movie the performances were pretty good by Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci everyone did a great job and i liked the whole plot with Georges being basically a horrible person and using all those women just to get their money and i get it why he used the 2 of them but Ricci actually loved the guy and he treated her the same. Now do i think that this film deserves the ratings it gets? No but i don't blame the reviewers to be honest with you.

3 days down the line and I'm still thinking about Bel Ami with Robert Pattinson. Unlike what you might have heard, it wasn't bad because of Robert Pattinson. Although it might seem incongruous to have him as the lead, he does, overall, an all right job and it is easy to forget that many of the female characters that he seduces throughout the film are, on occasions over twice his age. The issue doesn't necessarily lie, either, with the inevitable cuts made to the original plot line in order to produce a usable script. Indeed, the book needs to be concentrated in order to fit a 1"30' format and so things have to be somewhat truncated, concentrated and, on occasions, selected out of the the original work. The same way, some details will unavoidably be removed while others exaggerated and the characters will be simplified. Also, on occasions, the plot line of a book can be used as little more than a general framework on which a whole new piece is build. This was done with Great Expectations with Gwyneth Paltrow, and resulted in an OK flick. It was also done with Apocalypse Now and resulted in what is largely regarded as a masterpiece. Part of the disappointment, with Bel Ami is that the original piece is already extremely condensed and highly cinematic. The plot line is extremely linear and has few complexities. This is partly what makes it a classic. It's short, straight to the point, on occasions quite harshly so, unforgiving and might even change how you view what it means to be human. Bel Ami is a dark, unforgiving piece where humanity is seen as little more than a troupe of baboons, whose entire lives revolve around a game of bullying, violence, backstabbing and the constant rise and fall of a dominant Alpha Male.It talks of corruption and the interaction between the press and the political class and how the media control our lives by dispensing and retaining information, spreading rumours and, occasionally, fabricating fake information. As a matter of fact, Bel Ami himself ends up being ordered to take part in a proper western style show down by his publisher after being exposed as having fabricated false info.If you can't make a movie with that, then you probably shouldn't be making movies at all...So, once you have removed these elements from the original scripts, you are left little more than the characters, or at least some of them, and a lose plot line, although the characters become unavoidably flimsy, once they have lost their basic motivations and so the plot line starts making no sense at all. The only ones that comes out more or less unscathed are, as expected, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott-Thomas, but they probably could be reading the phone book and still be interesting. Everyone else is struggling.What results is occasionally excellent actors saying their lines without a clue about what's going on in a low budget, half arsed Victorian reconstruction... Otherwise, the movie fails largely because of the editing. About halfway through, scenes suddenly start becoming shorter, jumping from one situation to the next in a totally disjointed way. For instance, nothing has been said of Suzanne's character or her relationship with Bel Ami. Also, unless you've read the novel, I wonder if anyone would understand why she suddenly appears in Bel Ami's coach or that he's kidnapping her... How to explain, then, that her father insists on their getting married on the spot?Other major irritants include the powder coated cast aluminium Ikea garden table used in every single scene at the Follies Bergeres; Forestier played by a bloke easily in his fifties, although purportedly a private under 26 years old Pattinson a few of years prior to the beginning of the movie; Their friendship turned into deep animosity by the scriptwriters, which make it impossible to account for Bel Ami visiting him on his deathbed; Bel Ami's small business owners family turned into illiterate peasants who rely in the curé to write weekly letters (hard to imagine Bel Ami or his family as keen church goers...) or his life of utter squalor which makes no sense at all for an office worker in a railway company... And, last but not least, the name of media mogul Walter changed to Rousset in order to remove any suggestion of his Jewish origins... There was a time when Hollywood producers insisted on ethnic and religious minorities characters in order to help viewers of different backgrounds feel included. Doing the opposite is offensive.

Pattinson ruins for me an otherwise interesting, well acted and well directed film. I love period movies and this film looks fantastic. Uma Thurman gives a great performance. She is witty and fast. That just makes Pattinson all the more difficult to watch. He has the the same blank expression no matter what the emotion it is he is trying to convey. Great actors make you believe the role they are playing. I just don't believe him. I just see the melancholy expression of a Vampire. He plays a greedy but unintelligent social climber. Who thinks seducing woman is the way to advance his position. He is given a job as a writer by an old army buddy who has succeeded. But he is barely literate and is seen right through by everyone. He seems to be the last to know. Maybe this was not the right role for him right now. But whoever advised him to take this role served him wrong.

I was left slightly bewildered after reading some reviews for this movie saying things like the film was 'just like dangerous liaisons' or that'Robert Pattison let the movie down'. I on the other hand enjoyed Pattison's performance in Bel Ami in contrast to his other films such as Twighlight. I thought that he showed a great deal of emotion (which some people have disagreed on) which drew me in to try to understand the complexities of his character.I found myself involved in the story line the whole way through the movie but was left slightly put off with the ending (I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to movie's and novel's). The only similarities between Bel Ami and Dangerous Liaisons that I can pin point is the general time era, Uma Thermon (great in both) and the multiple of beautiful women as man characters to the story. Other then that the plots are distinctively different. I basically just wanted to write a review to tell people to give the movie a chance if you enjoy other movies set in similar times, if only to see what i thought to be a really great performance from Patterson. The Three leading ladies were all lovely and distinctively their own throughout. I very rarely have little to criticise about a movie but give this movie a 6/10. hopefully that was helpful :)