I’m all for new, unique and different movies to watch, but not everything new, unique or different is good.  And Branded is not good.  It’s a Russian-American co-production which posits that advertising and marketing is a global evil used to foist unhealthy products on oppressed peoples by gigantic corporations who don’t care about anything except profit.  That premise is certainly true, but this movie stumbles over itself trying to persuade viewers to believe it.

Most of the movie sluggishly explains how masters of manipulation can change public opinion about just about anything, steering consumers away from one thing to its rival or opposite, by shrewd, mostly negative, marketing.  That’s fine.  Though the story is slow and uninteresting, it makes a point.  Then, suddenly, it becomes some asinine science-fiction globular monster movie with terrible special effects and a level of ludicrousness not seen since Anaconda.  Then, somehow, it reverts back to its original story, with the happy ending of having all advertising banned around the world.  At least it ended properly; I cannot abide most advertisements.

Written and directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Alexander Doulerain (Aleksandr Dulerayn), Branded is a movie with something (very obvious) to say, yet no real idea how to say it effectively.  The globular monster stuff is so hideously cartoonish that it simply overwhelms the seriousness of its real story; in addition, its odd interstellar narrator is just nonsensical — especially considering what the main protagonist (Ed Stoppard) does out in a Russian field somewhere.  Poor Leelee Sobieski weaves in and out of the story providing sex appeal, while Jeffrey Tambor and Max von Sydow are completely wasted as advertising honchos.  Someday, perhaps soon, Branded will be rebranded as a camp classic, with midnight shows devoted to promoting its quite bizarre mix of drama, sci-fi and anti-business rhetoric.  ☆.  13 September 2012.