Interesting movie, but terribly flawed (Spoilers)

I just finished watching the movie and I must say that while the premise is interesting, it's execution was extremely flawed.

The first (and probably most noticeable) flaw is the pacing itself. The movie's pace is slowed to a crawl thanks to the constant interswitching between flashbacks and present moments. I suppose this is for the purpose of keeping plot points intact within the viewers' mind, but what a terrible way to go about doing it. Using this method sacrifices good pacing and, while it does keep plot points fresh, the problem is that it can make the general plot-line more confusing due to the clashing of various points during this decreased pacing. The primary effect of this on the movie itself, I believe, is that the general plotline (xenophobia, ethnocentricity, general fear of unknown?) seems to have come out of nowhere.

Second problem I felt was the number of frivolous additional scenes to the movie. Once again, this was largely due to the constant flashbacks, but there were also a number of scenes which didn't really seem to serve an integral purpose to the plot. The most obvious of which was the inclusion of the sex scene (God, I hate it when movies do this), but a less noticeable one was the addition of that bandaged man. At first, it seemed to serve an important purpose, but after a while, the man and the consequential death seemed to dither away in importance other than as a reinforcement of "Mandingo's" ominous character (which was already extremely obvious) and for the political theme in this movie.

Lastly, while I have not much of a problem with the characters themselves, I really have to question some of the things they say. What I mean by this is that, at the most random of times, the characters seem to go into what I call "Drama Recession."

When they go into the Drama Recession, they say all sorts of things that seems to carry little to no sense of relevancy at all. The first major scene of this was probably the bandaged man. Out of nowhere, he started a tangent about politics? Then, of course, there was Mandingo's own political tangent. Of course, both of this is obviously relating to the movie's plot point that George is a uncultured, assuming man, yet the tangents remain obscure. Aside from that, I seriously have to ask what were the point of all those flashbacks if one of the primary plot points remain obscure regardless?

All in all, the one truly good moment in the movie was probably the end. At that point, the flashbacks stopped, and the pacing speed up considerably. What happens? Surprise, surprise, the movie became suspenseful and somewhat exciting. Not merely that, but ironically enough, the one part of the whole movie which didn't contain flashbacks was the one point in which symbolism seem to stand out the strongest.

If the end had been how the whole movie was, then this would have easily been a great movie.

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The tolerance of storyline inconsistency is why we have so many bad movies today.