I picked this film purely for nostalgic reasons, and I don’t mean that in a fond way. Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, was one of the first movies I ever reviewed on here way back in December of 2014. That was back when I was still heavily in the phase of obsessing over people who talked about movies, as opposed to obsessing over the movies themselves, and I still had a lot of growing up to do as a writer and just as a person in general. Chances are there are quite a few films from back then that I’d likely have a different take on if I were to write about them today (hell, that has definitely been the case for a few of them, like The Babadook), but Crowe’s first attempt as a director has never struck me as one of those potential examples. So, let’s see how he goes at his second attempt in the chair, and him now writing the script as well.
Stuff like this makes me glad that I don’t have a dedicated plot synopsis in all of my reviews anymore, because actually laying out the story for this thing is… difficult. It’s a head-on collision between way too many different genres and narrative conceits, involving Crowe as a tech billionaire who invites all his friends around for a poker game, and then poisons their drink glasses with a truth serum to get secrets out of them, and then a home invasion happens; it’s a mess. It’s as if Crowe wrote a movie based on Andy Farmer’s unpublished manuscript from Funny Farm, tripped over, sent the pages flying, and then he put them back together out of order.
Now, to give the man a bit of credit, I’ll admit that I like some of the banter in this. Paul (Steve Bastoni) recounting the day he got into politics was pretty funny, and having people just openly calling each other shitcunts is the kind of thing that makes me proud to be Australian. But whatever fleeting enjoyment I got out of this pales in comparison to my incredulity at just how pompous this thing is. There’s all this poncing around about the purpose of art and storytelling and maybe some bits to do with surveillance and gambling, and for as much as Crowe’s writing and narration tries to sell it as something profound and intriguing… well, it should say something when even I can’t bear it. When it got to the point where Crowe says in narration, and entirely without irony, “My daughter’s about to be hit by a train and there’s nothing I can do about it, because I am the train.”, I knew I had crossed the Terence Malick event horizon.
It doesn’t help that the film craft as a whole is incredibly flat as well. Everything shown, from an impromptu street race to the poker game to the invaders searching the house for valuable art while the guys are in a panic room, is so utterly lacking in tension or anything resembling excitement that it’s frankly shocking. I mean, purely through the nature of the plot, which features prominent threats of death at many turns, sure this would’ve created some anxiety purely by accident if anything. Instead, the most unease this causes is due to whatever in the actual fuck was done to Liam Hemsworth’s face and hair in this thing. I don’t know what’s worse: Casting him as the childhood friend of Russell Crowe, or the ghastly make-up work trying to sell it.
So, in addition to showing little-to-no improvement on Crowe’s part as a director, he’s now proven that he’s not good at writing movies either. With how much I’ve come to appreciate him in most if not all films I’ve seen him act in, I certainly would like to report that he can make that transition successfully. But unfortunately, it’s just a risky play that exposes itself quickly as a bluff.
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