BEFORE: There are just a few games left in the NBA season, so I've been working all of the last home stand for the Brooklyn Nets. There was like, zero chance of that team making the playoffs. But what's great about having two jobs is that while one job might be shut down, for say, Easter break, because it's run by a college, there's a chance that things could pick up at the other job to compensate, and that's where I find myself right now. There will be a couple weeks before the WNBA games start up, so essentially I've got several weeks off from THAT job, and it looks like I'm about to get very busy at the other. Now, if BOTH temp jobs were to slow down, I'd be in some trouble, that would mean I'd have to kick the job hunt into high gear again. But the college is about to start thesis presentations in late April and May, plus the Tribeca Film Festival starts in early June, so I hope to be very busy at the theater, and I'll work as many NY Liberty games as I can, plus concerts maybe, but my focus might be shifting back over to the theater job, that's all.
Margot Robbie carries over from "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway". I know, why not just have Simon Pegg carry over "Mission: Impossible", but I had to get the rabbit film to land on Easter...
THE PLOT: Follows the twisting tales of two assassins carrying out a mission, a teacher battling a fatal illness, an enigmatic janitor and a curious waitress leading a dangerous double life.
AFTER: Oh, what do I even DO with this film? It's streaming on Hulu, you can almost bet that means it's not good enough for Netflix, or else it's just not connected enough to Paramount or Amazon to find a streaming home there. I'll admit I don't know how all of that works, none of the films I produced really have a streaming home, but that's a long story, the difficulties of getting independent animation distributed, especially films aimed at adults. But I digress - this Hulu presentation is really kind of average at best, like all of the intensity of an assassin-based action movie, just without all the action.
Instead it's the BORING parts (mostly) of the killer-for-hire game, the showing up for clandestine meetings in cafes and bars and churches, getting phone calls that tell you where to be and when, and then sequestering in a rundown apartment for weeks while you wait for your target to appear in a window across the alley or something. The hitmen here have to do that, just WAIT and they chat to pass the time and they drink and they try to play cards, but usually they just end up arguing with each other. Meanwhile, there's an teacher who's got a fatal disease of some kind who goes to the same cafe, near the train station - it's the middle of the night and there are no trains, if there were he would jump in front of one and commit suicide - but I guess if you can't kill yourself, you might as well go have a cup of coffee and something to eat. Great tagline for the cafe, "Eating here is slightly better than killing yourself."
Yes, I realize the double meaning of "Terminal", any train station at the end of the line is a terminal, plus the nature of the assassination business - it's really the only joke the film has, so of course they play it up every chance they get. Cleverness in the plot, unfortunately, is a lot harder to come by.
The film also jumps around in time, quite liberally - to the point where after a while it's impossible to tell WHEN anything happened, and are we dealing with a split timeline, like one in the past and one in the present, or is everything just randomly ordered to make us more confused, or to cover up all the gaping plotholes? Anyway the story shifts three weeks back in time, to that same waitress from the cafe, posing as a prostitute in order to get a man into bed, where she ties him up (kinky) but then kills him. This has something to do with her desire to work for the mysterious Mr. Franklyn, but she wants to be his only employee, and she intends to kill all of his competition, or maybe her competition, to nail down the job.
We then see Mr. Franklyn hiring two of his regular hit-men to do a job, and this involves picking up a briefcase from the train termimal, and figuring out the job from the clues in the briefcase. Again, since we're jumping back and forth in time, it's impossible to determine if we're looking at the past or NOW, if the word NOW still has any meaning, which it kind of doesn't here. Everything just happens at "story time", and we have to work pretty hard here to put the pieces in order, and I don't usually like that. When they follow the matchbook clue to the strip club, they see Annie, the waitress, doing double duty as a dancer, but what this means is still anybody's guess. You know, maybe she just has two jobs, she works in the cafe and also the club, that wouldn't be the weirdest thing in the world. And then the third job is to relay information to the hitmen from their employer? Sure, could happen, I guess but things are getting more and more unlikely.
Annie also tries to "help" the teacher, she gives him great advice about how to commit suicide, various methods, what would be quickest or least painful, and he's kind of into the idea. I mean, if you've got an undetermined fatal disease, and you could die at any moment, that could lead your brain down some very weird paths, thanks to intrusive thoughts. Or if you've got a beautiful woman who's willing to assist you, that could be somewhat convincing. For a minute it almost seems like Annie is the mastermind here, and she's hired the hitmen to kill this teacher to make his painful death a little less painful? Nah, that would be much too easy, the real truth of what's going on here is WAY more complicated than that.
But that's it, I'll say no more about the plot because if all that is intriguing to you, you can watch the damn movie yourself. I had to endure it, so I wish the same on you, and I don't even know you. (Do I? You seem kind of familiar...). But of course there is a reason here for people to be doing what they do, and it all makes sense after the fact, they just take their damn time in getting to a point where something HAPPENS and all is revealed, and then fortunately we can all get back to whatever we were doing before this movie came into our lives. It's only 95 minutes long but it FELT like forever. I don't know, maybe you'll like this sort of thing if you're deranged somehow or have absolutely nothing better to do.
Directed by Vaughn Stein (assistant director on "Beauty and the Beast" and "Wonder Woman")
Also starring Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Dexter Fletcher (last seen in "The Long Good Friday"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Max Irons (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Katarina Cas (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Nick Moran (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Matthew Lewis (ditto), Les Loveday (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Jourdan Dunn (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Thomas Turgoose (last seen in "Mickey 17"), Jay Simpson (last seen in "Enola Holmes"), Ben Griffin, Robert Goodman (last seen in "Napoleon"), Paul Reynolds (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle")
RATING: 4 out of 10 references to "Alice in Wonderland"
No comments:
Post a Comment