Nebraska is yet another disappointing film from Alexander Payne. Its only redeeming quality may be that it makes his last overrated Oscar-favorite 'The Descendants' look awfully good in comparison.

The lack of a real plot and hashing of largely old ideas about the mid-west, stealing a few pages from the giant Coen-brothers canon here and there, are not really the factors that hurt Nebraska. If anything they breathe a bit of life in the otherwise largely a dull, grinding ordeal.

The biggest fail is Bruce Dern's viscously dull Woody Grant. A senile, decrepit, mildly stubborn man utterly lacking any sort of depth. He doesn't remember anything. He barely says anything. There is nothing in him that you want to root for. Nothing that you want to learn about him and there is hardly anything that you do learn about him. It should be a crime to be so dull.

You see time and again, long shots of his face, with disheveled silver hair, and a gaping mouth, aghast at absolutely nothing. This only works if the face is Payne's joke on the the general state of malaise in the great American mid-west as it watches the world pass by leaving them behind.

The cinematography of the stark, gray landscape is nice but way too deliberate.

Only Jane Squibb as Woody's potty-mouth wife Kate adds some color to this bleak affair. The film and Woody's character can best be described in the final three words that Kate says - "you big idiot".