I was raring up to like this movie quite a bit just from genre association alone. A rom-com/heist flick made and set during COVID lockdown, after films like Host proved that there’s pathos to be wrung out of the timeliness, with a plentiful cast of actors I’ve grown to love over the last few years; what could possibly go wrong? Well, in short, just about everything, but I’m not exactly in the mood to show this thing the mercy of brevity.
For a start, until the last 20-30 minutes of this two-hour offering, you can basically ignore any and all genre labels attached to this thing, as the vast bulk of the film is taken up by conversations between characters. Some of it’s through Zoom, some of it’s in-person, and all of it is so aggressively overwritten that it manages to fill up 120 minutes without actually saying anything. Coming from writer Steven Knight of Serenity ‘fame’, I can’t say I’m all that surprised, but it’s not even entertaining in its inanity this time around. It’s just massive slabs of jargon and business-ese and genuinely pretentious pontificating on how the COVID lockdown has affected everyone. Not because of the virus itself; more the inconvenience of being stuck inside all day.
Oh, it tries to give it more meaning than that, and initially, it even turns out okay with a quip from Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Paxton about not knowing where you end and furniture begins. But as it continues, and Ejiofor fully becomes the author’s avatar, it devolves into more navel-gazing about free will vs. fate and how we’ve all become ‘inmates’ under these conditions, managing to turn the whole thing into just mild discomfort. This isn’t helped by Anne Hathaway as Linda, whose starting dramatic moment is having to fire a number of people over Zoom and how that made such an impact on her. Between that and the Edgar Allen Poe running joke that made me want to do some running of my own, there’s an inescapable vibe of condescension permeating every barren frame of this thing.
It’s rather ugly in how it presents the most privileged perspective on the pandemic possible, to the point where any references to real-world impact (namely in England, where it’s set) are shown without any context to have it make sense. People are just banging pots and pans together on the patios because of the NHS, in a sentence that I’m sure would mean something if either the writer or the director could be arsed to show its significance.
Instead, they just show cameo after cameo from people who deserve better dialogue than anything Knight has to offer (and that goes for Hathaway and Ejiofor as well, both of whom I feel genuinely sorry for after sitting through this), with myriads of cliches ripped right out of the rom-com playbook that has been collecting dust over the past twenty years. Oh, and an underwhelming low-key heist sequence right at the end, which is hardly worth sitting through everything else to get to.
This is basically the anti-Host. It’s a film made for the sheer fuck of it rather than any kind of true inspiration, filled to the brim with name-brand actors who seem to be here just because there’s nothing else to do rather than being passionate about the material, and dangling interesting genre combinations in front of the audience’s collective faces while actually presenting them with words for the sake of words that make staring at the ceiling for two hours seem like the more entertaining prospect. It is as needless as a film can possibly get at this point in cinematic history, and for the sake of my own mental health, I’m going to try not to think about how the NHS that these people claim so much reverence for could’ve used the $3 million this time vacuum apparently cost to make.
No comments:
Post a Comment