It's a middle management movie. The best way I can describe XIII is that it's like going into a movie that looks promising with its flashy explosions and sexy characters and even has a few big names behind it. Then you quickly discover it's actually more of soap opera drama where the characters spend more time repeating over and over their terrible problems until you lose all sympathy for them. Made worse by the fact it uses great actors but obviously the writers and the director were purchased from the bottom of the barrel to pay for the big name actors to appear. The actors sometimes do moving moments but the script is awful and often times comes off more unintentionally funny and pathetic rather than actual dramatic. It's not even B-Movie "so bad it's good" it is just kinda hard to watch cause everything is done so over-excruciatingly dramatic and the plot never goes anywhere for what feels like hours. Even when you finally get to the most talked about portion of the film, you've been barely paying attention so the lack of context and sheer mental strain of the awful story just makes the whole scene fall flat and have you wishing you were watching the credits instead of the scene in question.

As you're brain slowly tries to shut itself off, you start to look around you, and notice the person sitting in front of you is in the same boat. Except this guy has the bright idea of pulling out their cell phone and playing some Pac-Man, so now you find yourself half paying attention to the film but constantly being distracted by the guy playing Pac-Man cause sadly it's more interesting than what is going on the screen so you start watching him play Pac-Man. Occasionally you point out times he should go a different direction to avoid ghosts or grab a power pellet. Sometimes he lets you play, but doesn't hand you the cell instead, making you reach over the seat and play over him until he gets annoyed and you both agree it's better to just let him do all the work, while you watch and give some insight. Course the other patrons get annoyed at the whispering and spectacle and force you to stop interacting with the guy in front of you and forced to watch the film for 10-20 minutes before you both get bored and Pac-Man is out once again, you play until the other patrons yell and go back to watching the awful film. This pattern continues until the film is over.

Extend this scenario for 40 hours and you pretty much have the FFXIII experience.