Film Summary DCCV (Crack-Up)

You start out so strong and then you devolve into mediocrity.

You have this weird story involving an art critic who's not very well liked by any of his bosses, who then gets involved in a plot with murder, hypnosis and some bizarre scenario in where one of the weird art bosses (who you will not remember at the end of the film)
Who wants to steal an original painting, while replacing it with a forgery. 

This guy has to orchestrate all these different events; Involving our protagonist being under hypnosis on a train so that the police department thinks he's crazy.
Hiring this other guy to steal the original painting and replace it with a forgery which is then going to be destroyed on a boat so the police think it's lost at sea.*

There's this other agent who turns out to be working for Scotland Yard, who's searching for the painting. But it's revealed at the beginning of the movie to have just as little information on its whereabouts at the general police.
And he's in this weird on-again-off-again relationship with a girl who also happens to know our protagonist.
Everybody's interlinked and they really don't have a good reason to be.
It's an overly complex film for a surprisingly simple Heist.
And that's the most upsetting thing about it.
This film set up to have this great dilemma in where this art critic; Who's trying to get the general populace interested in paintings has to fight his own bosses. They want to keep the organization private and in the hands of the upper class.
There's a whole story you could have made their that would have been interesting enough in its own right.
Instead we end up with this half-baked detective story that completely loses sight of itself within the last 30 minutes.
And it's a shame as it's fairly well made and has some generally interesting cinematography. It felt like a 'real' movie as compared to those cheaper made detective thrillers. However it just couldn't stick the landing.
The acting is overalls pretty good though.
Except for the one woman who's supposed to be this strange love interests. She keeps having these breakdown moments and it sounds like corny a soap opera performance.

I think it would have been a much cooler movie if it just focussed on the psychiatric aspect.
Don't even bother having a plot involving stolen art.
Just have a strange story where our protagonist has to retrace his steps and try to clear his name

Maybe even have him break down more and discover that he might actually be insane or that he really did just get drunk and that the problem is entirely his own.

This is one of those films that would make for a decent remake. A film of a decent concepts but failed execution.

*I never understood why he wanted to destroy the forgery when it was made pretty clear that nobody could tell the difference between it and the original painting without sticking it inside an x-ray machine. A practice that nobody besides our protagonist wants to do as they see it as either unuseful or possibly even harmful.