In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon is a young Congressman running for Senate. You know, I bet a lot of people don’t know the difference between a senator and a congressman. I like to think of it as the difference between a line cook and a professional chef or a street prostitute and an indoors prostitute. Sadly, Matt Damon loses the race to become an indoors prostitute. But he does meet Emily Blunt hiding in the men’s bathroom. Apparently she’s hiding from security because she dared herself to crash a wedding. I know this is supposed to establish that she’s a free spirit (she dares herself to do things!), but it kind of established her as crazy and lonely. She should double-dog-dare herself not to intrude on the most important day of a stranger’s life.
Anyway, they kiss in the bathroom and don’t see each other again until he runs into her by chance on a bus. Apparently the Adjustment Bureau was supposed to stop that from happening, so they adjust the fuck out of Matt Damon by kidnapping him, taking him to a warehouse, tying him to a chair and threatening to wipe his mind clean if he doesn’t stay away from this cute girl he likes. Was “The Cockblock Bureau” already taken when they were choosing names for their club?
Matt Damon promises he’ll stop pursuing Emily Blunt, much like I promised my friends in college I wouldn’t hook up with this intense girl that had been aggressively pursuing me but was supposed to be mentally unbalanced. In the same way that I ended up making out with her in the corner of a goth bar until my roommate literally yanked me up from my seat mid-kiss, Matt Damon does everything he can to get some of that sweet mentally unbalanced Emily Blunt action until the Adjustment Bureau yanks him away from her mid-kiss so he can run for president.
The Adjustment Bureau has a lot of powers at its disposal to keep people from having sex, just like the religious right. They can manipulate people and objects with telekinesis. They have a network of magic doors they can travel through. They live thousands of years. They have amazing notebooks with Google Maps style layouts including up to date locations and projected paths of the people they’re tracking. But they still need to use cell phones. Why not go ahead and make the notebook also a communication device? Guess it would seem conspicuous to talk into a notebook. Then again, dressing like Eliot Ness in The Untouchables is also pretty conspicuous.
An agent in the Adjustment Bureau starts to develop a guilty conscience so he decides to help Matt Damon. He also reveals the secret of the Adjustment Bureau, which is that they are angels working for God and mankind has no free will at all. But then Matt Damon punches one of the agents and knocks him unconscious. I thought he was an angel! Do angels have the same brain as us? I thought angels were tough enough to battle the armies of Satan, but all it takes is one punch from Matt Damon and down he goes. No wonder there’s so much pain and suffering in the world with all these glass-jawed angels.
So Emily Blunt is about to marry her choreographer ex-boyfriend and Matt Damon has to stop it! The choreographer is only shown a few times so you don’t get attached to him and think of him as a human being and accidentally root for him. Even when he is on camera, he’s acting all huffy on his wedding day. What a fussbudget, he doesn’t deserve love!
Then Matt Damon and Emily Blunt get chased around by agents from the Adjustment Bureau. They get cornered on the roof by the Adjustment Bureau’s equivalent of a SWAT team. Where are the women in the Adjustment Bureau? Are there no women angels? Maybe they stay home and cook ambrosia for all the men angels. Knowing that their memories are about to get erased, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt start totally french kissing in front of the Adjustment Bureau agents. Woohoo! Making out in front of the personification of manifest destiny!
The Adjustment Bureau is loosely based on a story by Philip K. Dick. In the original story, a man discovers his life is being adjusted in order to set off a chain of events that lessen Soviet-Western Bloc war tension. But I think we can all agree that changing the plot to Matt Damon getting a girlfriend is a huge improvement. The End!
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