Someone should have blown the whistle on Oliver Stone. The lethargy he brought to Snowden painted the entire story as mundane and caked in a deluge of security jargon and phony ideas of importance. Compelling? Not really. Pulse-pounding? Nope.

Since much of this particular story is cloaked in secrecy, it allows for unusual creative freedom within a biography. This licensed Stone to interpret and fabricate a story stemming from what is known and essentially piggyback on an Academy Award winning documentary. Certainly a unique approach.

There might be more substance to this story. But maybe not and, in order to draw out the film, the relationship between Snowden (Gordon-Levitt) and Linsday (Woodley) was sifted to the forefront. And that, along with the average teen novel acting of Woodley, sealed the fate of this picture.

The dialogue was unnecessarily heroic. The supporting cast had little to support. Gordon-Levitt forced a surprisingly timid guise for someone as arrogant as Edward Snowden actually seems. No matter your persuasion regarding the politics, the film certainly disappoints and lacks audacity.

Snowden has asylum in Russia and is a similar distance away from the Film Clas Elite, landing only 2.1 napkins out of 5.