BEFORE: Finally, something comedic to lighten up the week. I'm over the 30-day mark for sheltering in place at home, playing old video-games to pass the time, trying to catch up on unread comic books so I won't be too far behind when they start publishing them again, and the better news is that according to the news, people in power are making plans to re-open things and re-start the economy. I'm not saying they're GOOD plans, because nobody really knows that, and the jury's out on whether there will be widespread testing, or whether there will be a second wave, but I'm perfectly happy to sit back and let a state like Georgia open bars and restaurants again as a test case, I mean, who needs all those Trump supporters in Georgia anyway, and somebody's got to be the proverbial canary in a coal mine, right? Let's pick a state that probably still runs on coal, there's something poetic about that. New York City will re-open only when the science numbers say it's OK.
Uma Thurman carries over from "The House That Jack Built".
THE PLOT: In an effort to avoid paying off a massive gambling debt to a notorious mobster in England, a couple flee to Los Angeles and hatch a jewel theft plot.
AFTER: So many things wrong with this movie - let's start with the beginning. There's a nun who delivers a bag full of money, then quite noticably swears and takes some drugs. There's some comedic promise in a start like that, only the nun is never seen again, so it's really the first of many wasted opportunities.
I've been re-playing a video-game called "Grand Theft Auto III", which was a huge deal back in like 2001, what with all the running over NPCs and violent action and picking up hookers in player's cars for bonuses. It caused quite a stir back in the day. But there are quite a few glitches in the gameplay, one of which I didn't remember until after re-playing the game for the last three weeks. It's called the "Purple Nines Glitch", the player has to accept a job from the leader of a gang, and that's to drive around a certain neighborhood and kill 20 gang members wearing purple jackets within two minutes. Only I couldn't find any members of the Purple Nines gang, because in another saved game on my memory card, I'd completed a mission where I helped the red gang eliminate the last few members of the purple gang. This meant that for all of the games saved on that memory card, there could be no purple gang members generated, and I could therefore not complete 100% of the game, there would be five missions that couldn't be unlocked if I couldn't finish the first one in that sequence. And there's no fix, the only solution is to start a new game from the disc without the memory card in place, after wiping all of the other saved game files from the card. But it would mean starting over at this point, and it would take days or weeks to get back to where I am now. Not worth it, I've played the game before and reached 100% completion before, so I'll just play whichever missions I can finish and then move on. Still, it's discouraging.
(I wrote a note on a post-it, to remind myself about the glitch the next time I play the game, so I'll start the game in the proper way and avoid the Purple Nines problem. I went to put the post-it inside the game case where I'd be sure to see it, only to find another post-it from four years ago with almost the exact same wording, to remind myself THIS time to start the game the right way - a warning which I obviously ignored in my haste to play the game last month. It figures.)
This film has characters making a similar mistake early in the film - they take the money from the nun that was supposed to be delivered to a high-ranking British gangster (or loan-shark, or something, it's not very clear) and one of the lead characters gambles with it and loses some, then loses some more, and then some more, and then it's pretty much gone. It's a mistake that sets the rest of the film in motion, but it also causes so many problems that it starts to feel like there's no way to did themselves out, so I'm thinking the only real solution was to maybe NOT gamble with money that wasn't theirs in the first place. Right? So if that's the case, then why the hell did they?
I guess you just can't unring that bell - so the criminal couple flies to Los Angeles, of course, and meets with an associate of theirs to find some work in town, to maybe get some money to pay back the female British gangster, and he's of course definitely not the type who would pretend to hire them and also call the gangster to tell her where to find them, so he can get a second cash payout for turning them in. Just kidding, that's exactly what he does. Meanwhile Peter and Harry (Harry is a woman) look up Peter's ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or something (this is also very unclear) who's living in L.A. and married to a filmmaker named Gabriel.
We know Gabriel's a filmmaker because he walks around saying things like "I'm a filmmaker" and "Don't you know, I'm making a film!" OK, thanks for that, only we never really see him making a film, only getting ready for "The Awards" where his current girlfriend is going to introduce him and present him with "The Award" if he wins. Clearly the Academy did not allow for the "Oscar" trademark or the phrase "Academy Awards" to be used in this film, and I think they made the right move. His wife, Jackie (Peter's ex-something) received a million-dollar ring from him, and Peter and Harry decide to have a duplicate ring made, get Jackie drunk at a party and switch the rings, making off with the million-dollar one. Only they probably spend much more time talking about this than doing it, in fact the whole film is mostly people talking about doing things rather than doing them, it's essentially a five-minute story stretched out to ninety minutes.
Harry, meanwhile, seems to have this ability to walk around any house or other setting and not be seen, it almost feels like her character is invisible because people don't seem to acknowledge her when they're in the same room with her. Believe me, if Uma Thurman were in a room with me, I would notice her. But she's there at the party, in nearly every scene, and nobody seems to care. Later on, probably when the director finally realized that other characters probably should notice that she's in the house, she's mistaken for the "dog whisperer" and has to spend the rest of the film telling rich people what their chihuahua wants to say. Which is not even how the famous "dog whisperer" works, he's just a trainer for troubled dogs, not an interpreter, which anybody who's seen even one episode of Cesar Millan's show would know.
So this starts as a crime film, but rapidly turns into a bedroom farce with rich L.A. people that ultimately goes nowhere, similar to a film like "She's Funny That Way", where each person is sleeping with two or possibly three different people, except there are a couple female characters who only complain about how they're not getting enough sex. OK, maybe pick a boyfriend that doesn't have a wife and another girlfriend on the side, have you tried that? The talents of Parker Posey as the disenchanted "filmmaker's assistant" are particularly wasted here. It's not that this is a bad movie, it's more like nobody seemed to care enough to take any steps to make it a GOOD movie. Like, be good or be bad, but just don't waste my time. I can find a lesson for these times even in a bad film, but today I'm really regretting wasting 90 minutes on this film.
Fun fact, the plot description on Wikipedia is factually one of the worst I've ever read, so this film is so below the radar that nobody's taken the time to spot-check or improve it. And the Wiki page also says this film has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, very difficult (or perhaps too easy) to achieve. And when I told my wife that, she said, "So, not even the director liked it?" No, he clearly hated this story and these characters, because he invested exactly zero time in improving them. Any points awarded below are given ONLY for the too-brief flashback love scenes between Uma Thurman and Maggie Q.
As an excuse, I think this film came on my radar because I'd heard about a heist film that took place at a Comic-Con, and "The Con Is On" would have been a great title for that. But I was confusing it with another 2018 film starring John Malkovich, which is called "Supercon". I'm going to try to get to that one later. But now that the San Diego Comic-Con has been cancelled for 2020, there's not much incentive. However, there's still a chance that New York Comic-Con will still take place in October, right now we're all waiting to find out if "The Con Is On".
Also starring Tim Roth (last seen in "Hardcore Henry"), Maggie Q (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Alice Eve (last seen in "Bombshell"), Sofia Vergara (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Parker Posey (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Stephen Fry (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Crispin Glover (last seen in "Wild at Heart"), Michael Sirow, Edward Zo, Carly Steel, Daniel Franzese, Quinn Meyers (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Teresa Yenque (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), with a cameo from Melissa Sue Anderson.
RATING: 2 out of 10 parking valets at the Chateau Marmont
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