Serenity (2019) - Movie Review

I’m not going to beat around the bush on this one: This film is fucking insane. I see no point in writing a poncy introduction to lead into that simple fact because this is an oh-so-very special kind of insane. The kind that only comes into being through just the right mixture of all the wrong elements in all the right places. The kind that makes the audience just how much of the film is meant to be taken seriously, if it’s meant to be taken seriously at all. The kind that turns a merely bad film into the stuff of bad film legend. It is the frontrunner for Best Worst Movie Of 2019, and if something else comes out that can challenge it, I fear I might end up in a padded cell just for looking at it.

This is ostensibly a neo-noir story, and one built on so many bloody clichés, it’s almost too much to believe. Matthew McConaughey is the gruff, hard-drinking fisherman who gets contacted by his ex-wife with a proposition: Take her and her violently-abusive current husband out on his boat, and feed him to the sharks.

Said ex-wife, played by Anne Hathaway, is one booby trap away from going full Jessica Rabbit, minus any resemblance of a personality. Same goes for Jason Clarke as the abuser, whose performance and ‘characterisation’ channels so much raw toxic masculinity that he becomes someone you certainly want to see get their just desserts, but can’t stand to watch for any length of time before that happens.

The film sets itself up as a somewhat rudimentary morality play, questioning whether McConaughey should kill this man or not, weighing up his conscience with what the bastard has done to his family. That on its own would be perfectly fine, except writer/director Steven Knight insists on taking the path of most resistance. He genuinely thinks this film is brilliant, and I can tell that from this side of the screen because he spells out everything that’s going on.

The exposition isn’t just in place for the story details; it functions for all the potential subtext as well, like when Hathaway says that she and McConaughey are “both damaged in different places”. Because she lives with an abuser, and he is a former soldier. Can’t say I was expecting subtlety from a film about fishing where everyone grabs the fishing rod like it’s their dick, but this goes above the beyond.

There are some other minor niggles I could bring up, like the artificially sped-up pan shots Jess Hall keeps using to introduce characters, or how Diane Lane’s role here is basically the same as Unfaithful minus any personality or much anything that isn’t having sex, or how McConaughey tells the only black person in this movie, his first mate played by Djimon Hounsou, to get off his boat because he’s “bad luck”.

But no, all of that doesn’t even register on my radar anymore in the face of what this film pulls out of its arse a little over halfway through. *MAJOR SPOILERS* ahead, so if you want to see what makes this so incredible for all the wrong reasons for yourself first, stop reading and go watch the movie. Everyone else who needs the hard sell, or just plain doesn’t care about such things, read on.

So it turns out that McConaughey isn’t real. Neither is anyone else on the island he lives on. Neither is the island itself. It’s all part of a computer game that his son made. It was originally made just for games like fishing, but now he’s altered it so he can live out his fantasy of killing his abusive step-father. And just to rub salt in the wound, the scene where McConaughey learns all of this is set during a literal dark and stormy night.

Sounds like a potentially interesting twist, right? A major paradigm shifter that completely alters everything the film is depicting, maybe adding some layers to the moral dilemma by making the notion of a judging God into an actual human being and one attached to the main character at that? In your fucking dreams!

For a start, this is the exact same problem with the big twist in Last Christmas: It takes a story element so bloody literally that it stops being dramatic and turns into farce. Nevermind that the only justification we get for how McConaughey is suddenly a self-aware program in a computer game is a few spare lines of found narration about machine learning. The film introduces this more sci-fi edge to the story, only to do nothing with the ethical implications that edge brings with it. It’s like Knight had a really good idea for a Black Mirror episode, only to discover that several elements of this story already made it into that series proper, so he tried to re-write it as a standalone film.

And the film still tries to push for the morality play! With all its talk of rules and how they’ve changed and Jeremy Stong’s representative for the program says that he is the rules (Yep, they actually pulled a “I am the evidence” in this film, and it’s even more hilarious), it still wants to sell the neo-noir side of things with a straight face. Except, by creating this twist in the first place, it overcomplicates it to the point of incomprehensibility. Imagine if the Dixie Chicks, while they were making Goodbye Earl, suddenly decided to turn it into an album-length prog-rock number; that’s how bass-ackwards this thing is.

I mean, why go through the moral dilemma as is when you can alter the narrative’s entire reality just so the decision to kill a drunkard spousal abuser is basically a non-issue. Oh, and by film’s end, the kid just murders the step-dad in real life. Outside of the game’s influence, and there was pretty much nothing stopping him before that point; he just up and kills him. Nothing says ‘mature story’ like taking the easiest way out imaginable. Or even unimaginable.

I cannot believe that this film even exists at all. This makes Collateral Beauty look lucid. This makes The Book Of Henry look like the cohesive film ever made. It is absolutely terrible in all respects, despite how badly the actors are trying to breathe life into these literal facsimilia of human beings, and yet I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. As someone who will freely advocate for watching movies ironically, this is a Dude-send far as I’m concerned.

I’ll admit that I haven’t thought all that highly of Steven Knight as a film creative before, although he has worked on some films I’ve enjoyed like Burnt, but I had no idea he was capable of something this awful, yet so utterly entertaining. If you’re in the mood for a bad movie night, check this one out, and if it seems like I’ve already spoiled all of it for you, trust me: There’s a big difference between just reading about what happens, and actually watching it unfold in real time.