Review of "Inception"

With its James Bond-on-acid action scenes and puzzle-within-a-maze-within-a-puzzle mind games, "Inception" is certainly the most daring and original blockbuster of the year, as well as a visual tour de force.

If it only had a heart.

The film does have a romance, that being between a widower and the memory of his dead wife. Which may be interesting, but it's a bit hard to get much emotional traction from a memory.

Still, that chilly absence is just about all that's missing from "Inception" -- that and possibly logic. It's hard to tell just how much sense the whole thing makes, at least on one viewing.

Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through -- when our characters are racing through a dream within a dream within a dream -- such considerations seem to drift. But hey, the whole package is so giddy and dazzling it hardly seems to matter.

Meet Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who makes his living by entering other people's dreams and stealing secrets from their minds. Don't ask how, but writer-director Christopher Nolan ("The Dark Knight," "Memento") makes this seem perfectly feasible.

Accompanying Cobb on his dream missions is Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, finally and rightfully breaking into the big leagues), a sort of all-purpose tough guy. But when a wealthy industrialist (Ken Watanabe) offers Cobb a challenging new job, he has to put together a special team of dream weavers.

That challenge is reversing Cobb's usual process -- instead of taking information out of a mind, he is tasked with inserting an idea into the mind of a man (Cillian Murphy).

So Cobb goes in search of a generally brilliant person who will serve as the architect of the dreams they enter and comes up with Ariadne (Ellen Page). But Ariadne is so brilliant that she quickly deduces Cobb's essential weak point: He is haunted -- in his dreams and others' -- by the dangerous memory of his wife (Marion Cotillard).

If this all sounds complicated, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Nolan eventually takes Cobb and his troupe (which also includes thief Tom Hardy and chemist Dileep Rao) down, down, down through layers of dreams, stacking concurrent adventures atop one another, building an intricate edifice of a plot that at all times threatens to tumble and crash.

If it's not all perfectly understood (or perfectly constructed), enough of it works, along with the constant chase scenes and wondrous special effects, to keep the viewer glued to the screen.

Arthur has a long, gravity-defying fight sequence in a hotel that keeps flipping around; skyscrapers crumble and fall; the world explodes around Cobb and Ariadne as they watch from a Paris café. Nolan jumps continent to continent in search of ever more striking scenery, just as Cobb jumps from dream to dream.

The cast here is any director's dream, with Nolan augmenting stalwarts from his Batman movies (Murphy, Watanabe, Michael Caine even pops up) with Oscar-level talent (DiCaprio, Page, Cotillard) and the red-hot Gordon-Levitt. DiCaprio and Page are the center, but the film still has an ensemble feel.

Whether audiences find "Inception" a bit too mind-boggling remains to be seen. And the film's dependence on Rubik's Cube-philosophizing at the cost of gut-level emotion keeps it from true greatness.

But Hollywood will be hard-pressed to produce a more ambitious and inventive spectacle this year. "Inception" proves the dream lives on.