YMMV / The Ides of March

• Harsher in Hindsight: Paul asking for quaaludes, 3 years after the film came out, Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a drug overdose.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As mentioned below, the main plot of the movie could be seen as this since we could have seen an idealistic US presidential political campaign manager having his idealism destroyed by the corrupt nature of politics. Unfortunately, the main character does some morally questionable actions right at the start and then pretty much throughout the entire story, which kind of wastes that potential.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The entire movie is pretty much this with an idealistic US presidential political campaign manager having his idealism destroyed by the paranoid nature of politics and corruption. Which might be interesting, except the character in question does some morally questionable actions right from the beginning of the story. This makes it hard for the audience to like him or view him as the Wide-Eyed Idealist the script insists he is. As a result, the entire plot just seems sort of pointless.