Whenever I see a review that accuses the film of being boring, I usually assume that the reviewer is a teenaged moron with the attention span of a radish and approximately the same intelligence. And then I watch the film and find it utterly captivating. Not this time!At risk of sounding like a teenaged moron, I must say that Random Hearts was totally boring. I mean an utter snooze-fest. Soporific. Mind-numbingly dull. Pointless. Tedious. Monotonous. And also way too long.The paper-thin plot could have made a decent enough 1 hour drama, but here (for a budget of 64 million bucks!!!) a narrative that could easily be described in one sentence gets dragged out to over two hours of bumbling, inept story-telling; lousy pacing from both director and editor, a sizable array of respected actors being utterly wasted/misused, recycled music that is almost identical to The Firm (same director and composer) with splashes of Tootsie (same director and composer) and the clumsiest, most ill-conceived and poorly executed subplot (padding) I've ever seen in a movie that wasn't made by 16-year-old film students.Altogether an amateurish, lazy, and execrable waste of time.

Random Hearts (1999): Dir: Sydney Pollack / Cast: Harrison Ford, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles S. Dutton, Bonnie Hunt, Dennis Haysbert: Advertised as a disaster film, romance, suspense, and drama. It fails on all accounts. It regards the reality of people coming together through circumstances beyond their control. Harrison Ford stars as a cop whose wife died in a plane crash. Kristen Scott Thomas plays a congresswoman whose husband died in the same crash. Could they have been having an affair? Are trees green in summer? It will surprise no one when they become romantically linked. Even their first sexual encounter in a car seems horribly cliché. Director Sidney Pollack does his best but the production looks drab. He previously directed Ford in Sabrina but this hardly matches his work in films such as Absence of Malice and Tootsie. Apparently Ford being a major box office draw isn't working for Pollack. Perhaps he should cast him in an action film, since he generally draws in those. Ford and Thomas cannot save this dreary film and seem to be coasting on star power only. Charles S. Dutton and Bonnie Hunt appear in flat supporting roles. Part of the problem is that the marketing doesn't know what the film is. The romance is bland at best and the thriller elements are a blink and miss variety. Cheap film with a cheap payoff only interested in a sigh from the audience. Many will sigh from impatience. Score: 2 / 10

The opening scenes grab you and push you back into your seat. The two stars of the film have just lost their spouses in an air crash. They must identify the bodies. Harrison Ford discovers his wife was sitting next to a man in first class so he calls upon the wife of this man. He suspects that they might have been having an affair. Harrison Ford is such a good actor; he leads you into the film and won't let you go. This is a bit unfortunate because the story slowly deteriorates. No viewer can miss what is going to happen next but this review will not tell you just in case someone new to American cinema fears "a spoiler." The acting is so good that the film can hold your interest, but it does not seem to live up to its riveting beginning.

**SPOILERS** Overlong and somewhat confusing drama involving an airplane crash, Southern Airline flight from D.C to Miami, where two of the crash victims were cheating on their spouses.It's not much later that one of those being cheated on Washington D.C internal affair police Sgt. Dutch Van Den Broeck, Harrison Ford, got wind from her job that his old lady Peyton, Susanna Thompson, was on a flight to Miami to do a fashion shoot for her employer Sacks 5th Av of Washington D.C. Desperately trying to find out if Peyton was on the doomed flight Ducth not only finds out that she was, through a morgue photo at the crash site, but she was using an assumed name! Peyton was using the name of the wife of the person that booked the flight Cullen Chandler, Peter Coyote. Things get even more strange when it's discovered that the late Mr. Chandler's wife, who he's been cheating on, is non other then New Hampshire congresswoman Kay Chandler, Kristin Scott Thomas, who's now in a life and death campaign for reelection!The movie brings the two, Dutch & Kay, together in finding if in fact it's true that they were being cheated on by their marriage partners. And in the process they end up falling in love with each other! If it was just that the film "Random Hearts" would have made for a pretty good adult love story. Instead by putting into the film murder drug dealing both police corruption and political chicanery the movie at times was almost impossible to follow!Dutch who should have taken a leave of absent from the D.C Police Department in order for him to overcome his grief goes the exact opposite direction. Instead he goes full blast in busting fellow D.C cop George Beauford, Dennis Haysbert, for drug dealing by him getting, which is very unprofessional on Dutch's part, very personal about it. This not only leads to Dutch's top informant to get murdered but Dutch almost ending up murdered himself! Or at the least losing his job or being put behind bars for taking the law into his own hands! All of this together with Dutch trying to find out if his wife Peyton was untrue to him seemed too much for the poor guy to handle. As for Kay she had far more pressing problems in the fact if her dead husband's infidelity became public it could very well screw her out of a second term in the US Congress!***SPOILERS*** With the film being much too long, 133 minutes, as well as complicated and confusing you completely lose interest in it at about the one hour mark! It takes a while to realize what exactly Dutch & Kay are so desperately looking for, their cheating partners secret love nest, and when they, independent of each other, finally find it what was the big shocking surprise anyway! It only proved to Dutch & Kay, what we in the audience knew all along, what should have been obvious to them right from the very beginning of the movie!