Some of you may notice I don't give many negative ratings. That is for three big reasons. The first is that I don't seek out shitty movies. If I've heard nothing but bad things about a movie I'm probably not gonna pay to go see it, and by the time I get around to watching it online I feel like too much time has passed to justify reviewing it. The second reason is that I tend to look for the good in movies. So there will often be films I give right around 3 stars that others will have lower, but there's something there that makes me give it the positive score. The third reason is that sometimes when I see a bad movie I just don't care about it enough to write a review. However, once in a while a movie comes along like The Snowman, or this new movie Serenity that I can't not write about.
Serenity looks like it could be a cool or at the very least disposable neo-noir thriller, but alas it is not. It follows a fisherman that just really fucking loves fish, whose ex-wife comes to him asking for him to kill her new abusive husband. Not a bad story right? Wrong. This thing goes places you'd never expect, which is usually a good thing, but god are these twists and turns horrid.
I want to start with discussing the acting because it isn't all bad. Matthew McConaghey plays the lead and is meh. This feels like the kind of role and acting he was doing in the mid-2000s with stuff like Sahara. It isn't good acting but it could have been serviceable. The abusive husband is played by Jason Clarke, and he's not bad in the film. His character is really annoying and douchey but he plays it well. The wife is played by Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway can do no wrong right? Wrong. Once in a while she has a southern accent, sometimes its a different American accent, and sometimes she's doing a weird imitation of a 40s noir character so over the top that it feels like a parody. She isn't just mediocre in the film, she is bad. I also think it's worth noting that she shares a steamy scene with McConaghey where her entire chin ends up in his mouth. Djimon Honsou is also in the movie and it feels like he's the only person onscreen or on set that gives half a shit. He's solid, he's certainly done better, but he certainly isn't bad like most of the cast. There's a strange salesman character in the film played by Jeremy Strong, and Strong does a good job for what the character is, but the character itself is really weird and feels very out of place until the ridiculousness of the movie starts to fully kick in. The rest of the cast includes a small but okay performance by Diane Lane and a whole lot of shit.
The best way to describe the filmmaking on display here is incompetent. As I said before, the story is horrendously put together, and even just the dialogue throughout is really bad. The score is loud and obnoxious and doesn't fit at all. It would have been great for a big sweeping sci fi epic but for a film like this it does not work. Even aside from the score, the sound design as a whole is really bad, with some things stupidly loud and others way too quiet. The cinematography could be great but there are endless times where a shot could have been really beautiful but instead was framed very poorly. So many poor choices. The editing is first of all bad and choppy, and second of all causes the film to at times not even make sense. There is an abundance of errors with regards to simple continuity that are frankly unforgivable.
If it seems as though I'm shitting on every element of this film it's because every element is shit. There are a fair amount of times where I see a movie and think I could've waited until it was on Netflix or something, but I've never had this reaction to a film I've seen in theatres. I hated The Snowman but after seeing it I didn't feel ashamed of myself for spending the money on a ticket, and I honestly did after this movie. This was a miserable theatre experience that I will hopefully forget, if not I'm not gonna be happy.
Rating: 0.2/5 (the .2 is for Honsou, I feel bad for the guy getting dragged into this)
Written by Matt McKenzie
Serenity looks like it could be a cool or at the very least disposable neo-noir thriller, but alas it is not. It follows a fisherman that just really fucking loves fish, whose ex-wife comes to him asking for him to kill her new abusive husband. Not a bad story right? Wrong. This thing goes places you'd never expect, which is usually a good thing, but god are these twists and turns horrid.
I want to start with discussing the acting because it isn't all bad. Matthew McConaghey plays the lead and is meh. This feels like the kind of role and acting he was doing in the mid-2000s with stuff like Sahara. It isn't good acting but it could have been serviceable. The abusive husband is played by Jason Clarke, and he's not bad in the film. His character is really annoying and douchey but he plays it well. The wife is played by Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway can do no wrong right? Wrong. Once in a while she has a southern accent, sometimes its a different American accent, and sometimes she's doing a weird imitation of a 40s noir character so over the top that it feels like a parody. She isn't just mediocre in the film, she is bad. I also think it's worth noting that she shares a steamy scene with McConaghey where her entire chin ends up in his mouth. Djimon Honsou is also in the movie and it feels like he's the only person onscreen or on set that gives half a shit. He's solid, he's certainly done better, but he certainly isn't bad like most of the cast. There's a strange salesman character in the film played by Jeremy Strong, and Strong does a good job for what the character is, but the character itself is really weird and feels very out of place until the ridiculousness of the movie starts to fully kick in. The rest of the cast includes a small but okay performance by Diane Lane and a whole lot of shit.
The best way to describe the filmmaking on display here is incompetent. As I said before, the story is horrendously put together, and even just the dialogue throughout is really bad. The score is loud and obnoxious and doesn't fit at all. It would have been great for a big sweeping sci fi epic but for a film like this it does not work. Even aside from the score, the sound design as a whole is really bad, with some things stupidly loud and others way too quiet. The cinematography could be great but there are endless times where a shot could have been really beautiful but instead was framed very poorly. So many poor choices. The editing is first of all bad and choppy, and second of all causes the film to at times not even make sense. There is an abundance of errors with regards to simple continuity that are frankly unforgivable.
If it seems as though I'm shitting on every element of this film it's because every element is shit. There are a fair amount of times where I see a movie and think I could've waited until it was on Netflix or something, but I've never had this reaction to a film I've seen in theatres. I hated The Snowman but after seeing it I didn't feel ashamed of myself for spending the money on a ticket, and I honestly did after this movie. This was a miserable theatre experience that I will hopefully forget, if not I'm not gonna be happy.
Rating: 0.2/5 (the .2 is for Honsou, I feel bad for the guy getting dragged into this)
Written by Matt McKenzie
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