BEFORE: After tonight, just two more films before I go on vacation - we're flying down to Atlanta and we're going to drive to Columbia, SC and Raleigh, NC, on BBQ Crawl #3, with additional stops at state fairs in both Carolinas, plus whatever else we find fun to do. My wife and I prepare to go on vacation in very different ways, she's setting up the cat-sitter, doing laundry, figuring out what to pack three days in advance, while I'm busy getting my COVID Omicron booster shot and trying to clear episodes of "Jeopardy!" and "Law & Order" off my DVR so it doesn't fill up while we're gone. I'm checking the dates of the World Series to see if maybe my favorite TV shows will be off that week. Nope, no such luck.
Ryan Reynolds carries over from "The Amityville Horror" (2005). I'm not sure this qualifies as a horror movie, it's listed as some kind of psychological thriller. There may be some potential there, but I'm really just using this film to connect two horror chains that I had planned, connecting them together this way gave me 19 films for October, which I'm counting as a full month, once I removed days for vacation and NY Comic Con. I didn't come up with a better plan, so it is what it is at this point.
THE PLOT: A troubled actor, a television show runner and an acclaimed videogame designer find their lives intertwining in mysterious and unsettling ways.
AFTER: OK, so this is not a horror movie. I'm still not sure what it IS, but I know it's not a horror movie. I'm not even sure how much of a "thriller" it is, because it didn't thrill me, I kept falling asleep. Of course, I was watching it after another late night working at the movie theater, but I'm going to ahead and blame the movie.
The film is in three sections, titled "The Prisoner", "Reality Television" and "Knowing". Ryan Reynolds appears in all three sections, but playing different characters, who of course look very much the same. And they sort of appear to be in each other's orbits, or so it seems over time, but they don't ever meet each other directly. Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy also appear in all three segments, also playing different characters in each one. So, umm, what's going on here? Well, that's the big question, isn't it?
Reynolds plays a TV actor at first, someone who appears on a crime procedural show, but who gets confined to house arrest after setting fire to some of his girlfriend's possessions, then doing drugs with a prostitute and totaling his car. OK, maybe he's going through some stuff, or maybe he's just an addict. Someone who works for his agent bails him out of jail and finds a house that belongs to another client for him to serve his time. She takes away his phone, all the alcohol in the house, and also anything that could start a fire - this lady seems like she's on top of things. While under lockdown, the actor seems to go a little crazy, he keeps seeing the number 9 everywhere, every dice roll adds up to 9, he sees more 9's in the newspaper than logically should be there, and there's a cryptic note in his handwriting that says, "Look for the nines" - only he didn't write it. After befriending the single (?) mother next door, who seems to be flirting with him, he can't quite get a read on her, because she says she's going to come over, but then leaves him hanging. Finally a talk with his handler convinces him to step outside the range of the ankle bracelet, and it seems at this point that the entire reality dissolves.
Next, we see Reynolds as a TV writer, and I think he's the guy that owns the house which the actor was staying in after getting arrested. Not sure. He's away working on his show, "Knowing", which stars Melissa McCarthy. The same actress who played the single mom before now appears as a TV executive trying to convince him to dump Melissa McCarthy from the show in favor of a more well-known actress, who turns out to be unavailable. But this ruins the relationship between the writer and McCarthy, so what was the point of that? Near the end of this, we learn that the writer is also the subject of a reality TV show, currently being filmed. Did he NOT notice the camera-person following him around everywhere? This is where things got just a bit too confusing for me.
In the third segment, Reynolds plays a video-game designer who's on a long drive with his wife (played by Melissa McCarthy) and daughter, but their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and he leaves them alone to try to get a signal on his phone. He meets a woman who looks just like the neighbor and TV executive from before, and he tries to get a lift from her to the next town or gas station. Meanwhile, his daughter, back in the car, watches clips from segments 1 and 2 on a digital camera, which sort of ties everything together, except that it also fails to do that.
There is an answer for everything, how it all fits together, I suppose - but I wasn't that happy with the answer. At one time Reynolds' character runs through the various possibilities to explain the unexplainable events and connections taking place. Perhaps this is a dream, perhaps he is dead, perhaps he's in a coma. Nope, it's none of those, and it's not time travel or multiverse travel either. I won't say what it is, just to point out that I'm unsatisfied with the explanation given. At such a late point in the film, a revelation should clear up everything that's gone before, instead it just makes everything we've seen so far even more confusing.
This film played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, which is something that DOES make some sense - the programmers there often love arty, challenging films that defy explanation. But the film bombed at the box office, and it's easy to see why. This would be very confusing to any movie-goer who wasn't on that indie, intellectual, vibe and seeking out a thought-piece of a film. I really wasn't in that mood tonight, I came here for another horror film, but at least if this film didn't deliver, I can fall back on the fact that it's made a connection to the next batch of horror films, so I'm essentially calling a mulligan tonight, this one's just going to move me on to the next, after the reveal there's really no reason for me to care about this one, or ever think about it again. Sorry.
Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Greenland"), David Denman (ditto), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Ben Falcone (also last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Dahlia Salem, John Gatins, Andy Fielder, Greg Baine, Ellen Treanor, Sean Andrews, with a cameo from Jim Rash (last seen in "The Onion Movie")
RATING: 3 out of 10 focus group participants
No comments:
Post a Comment