Did I miss something? I will not lie, the beginning of the movie was very intriguing and it hooked me into watching the rest of it, but to be honest with you...I kind of regret it.
The opening scene is very interesting and it's duration of about 5 minutes is the best part of the whole movie and the rest of the film badly fails to live up to its beginning.
Maybe some North American viewers thought this was a great picture because they saw shocking things in Iran such as how a 15 year old boy is already in the army - well that's no news to me, I was born in a country where you get taken to the army at 18 for 2 years whether you want it or not. Another "shock", as I read in a previous comment to this movie, was how there are luxurious jewelry stores in Iran....umm yeah... There are always rich people in big cities such as Teheran and that's what they do - they buy jewelry.
Most scenes in this movie were waaaay too long and some were completely useless and meaningless... What am I talking about? OK...how about when Hussein gives out pizza slices to the people he doesn't know (don't wanna give away too much) what was the point of that?...they spent like a minute of the movie on the main character walking from car to car giving people pizza slices. Or another scene I completely don't get is when Hussein sees that his co-worker suffered a bad crash on his bike while delivering pizza...A friend of mine tried to tell me that the point of this scene is for Hussein to realize how meaningless his life is and that being rich is better... How does it show that? If a rich guy crashed on a bike same thing would happen...he'd go to a hospital and the homeless guy would steal his helmet (you'll understand what I'm talking about if you watched the movie). The point is - that there is no point in that scene.
Twice I looked at my watch during the movie, both times towards the end because I knew it was supposed to be ending soon and didn't understand where it was going.
All in all, a disappointment. Great beginning, but everything else was bad. Too long, pointless. It would make a great short film though...shorten each scene by 10 minutes (yes they are very long) and you'll have the same movie without any loss in its message.