"Inception" might have been a better movie -- and would certainly have been more entertaining -- had writer/director Christopher Nolan not made his premise so complicated that the film had to spend its entire 2:25 running time explaining itself to its audience.

Seriously, the exposition Never. Stops. There were literally moments during action sequences where one character would pause and explain what was going on to another character, which of course was a ham-fisted way of explaining it to us. But even with all of that aggressive exposition, the movie never does make a lot of sense. The result is a lot of busyness -- oh, there's always plenty of stuff going on -- that's nevertheless pretty boring because it's never clear what all of the busyness is for.

Nolan has done this to us before. Who the hell came out of "The Prestige" with any clue what that movie was about? And even his more narratively coherent films (like "The Dark Knight") suffer from a lack of humor and a burden of philosophical pondering that the premises can't support. "Inception" is no exception (ha!). The movie is junk trying to disguise itself as something important and significant. How much more fun it would have been if it had just been content to be junk.

Grade: C-