Directed by Richard Stanley
What a bizarre and irritating movie this was. There isn't a single aspect of it that fully works, and tons that don't work at all, but there's just enough going for it to keep me entertained and hoping for a little more.
For starters, let's get the obvious out of the way. This movie naturally draws many comparisons to Mandy from 2018, which is another crazy, trippy, strikingly-lit horror-esque Cage movie. Mandy is kind of amazing, and this one is not, so if you're hoping for something that's legitimately good, look somewhere else. This movie has all the visual flair, but it's in a very goofy and poorly-conceived way, but I'll get more into that later. For now I want to talk about Nicolas Cage himself. Mandy was a subtle and at times crazy performance, but this one is pretty over-the-top and silly from the beginning. As we were watching it, we found ourselves laughing at his line delivery and comparing it to his hilarious Vampire's Kiss role --- which, according to IMDb trivia, was apparently Richard Stanley's favorite Cage role, so we were pretty on the money there. Basically what I'm saying is if you're looking for wacky so-bad-he's-amazing Nicolas Cage, this is a much better bet than Mandy. I laughed really hard several times.
But Nic Cage is where the memorable performances begin and end. The rest of the cast are astoundingly dull, amateurish, and sometimes just embarrassing. Well, almost all of them. Tommy Chong is also in this movie playing Tommy Chong, but he isn't in this enough for me to feel the need to talk about him more than that. The main characters are all really boring, and while that's mostly the dialogue's fault, it wasn't made any better by the actors. It's like Stanley was focused entirely on trying to get the most out of Cage, but just kind of let the other actors say their lines and call it a day after one or two passable takes. In a way, this is just kind of a perfect example of the movie itself. Attention paid to one aspect of one aspect, which is pretty great, but the rest is decent at best and mostly bad.
The characters spend most of the movie feeling like people who haven't spent their lives around one another. I felt no real attachment to any of them, only enjoying Cage's character due to how much fun it is watching him yell and act like an idiot, and I felt no chemistry between the actors themselves either. The characters are so thinly written and unbelievably dull, I only ever felt for brief moments like I was even supposed to care about them. There are bits of dialogue that have the characters exchange quippy insults that made me go "oh, so that's like a thing they do I guess", but never got a sense that they did it for any reason. Was there any strain in these characters' relationships with one another? I don't know. The movie never really showed it in any kind of way that worked, but maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention to that. I must've been distracted by how little I cared about what the characters were saying or doing.
The glowing pink lighting is striking and some practical effects are genuinely great, but there are tons of scenes and moments full of distracting CG and nonsensical lighting. There's one scene so poorly blocked, I couldn't tell where the characters were due to how the light hitting characters made no sense in relation to where they were supposed to be standing. They poured all this detail on making the lights look as shiny and cool as possible, but the moment you stop to examine it at all, you realize how poor the lighting actually was in regards to the scenes themselves. As for the CG, there's too much to go into about how bad that aspect was without me entering into "irrationally angry" mode. Instead I'll just say the CG feels lifted from video games released over a decade ago. But when they implement practical effects (particularly some short body horror sequences), it looks pretty great, but there isn't enough of that to distract from the bad aspects of whatever the hell that thing they almost hit with the car was. Okay, let's move on.
I have never read the H.P. Lovecraft short this film is based on, but seeing as how Lovecraft liked filling most of his writings with details about how horrific things are without (obviously) being able to show what those horrors look like, this movie seems like a far too faithful adaptation of his writing style. The general rule of "show don't tell" doesn't apply to books, but where this movie fails is in how it doesn't seem to realize that. For example, there are ways to convey bad smells in movies through use of sound and visuals, but this movie chooses to just have characters say "there is a bad smell here" and then go on to explain what the bad smell smells like. We never get a sense that this smell is ever present, just that the characters are saying they smell something because the movie says so. Nic Cage makes an effort to visualize his disgust at the supposed smells, but no one else does. What a pro.
But over the uneven visuals, bad acting, and weak plot, the biggest problem with this movie is in relation to the dialogue itself. As mentioned before, the way characters talk is clinical and descriptive, but not even remotely genuine. There are explanations of smells, explanations of the plot, exchanges of quips without context or believability, and none of it amounts to anything substantial. It's all so on the nose and meant to convey points to audience, but never seems to resonate with the characters themselves. Characters say what they're thinking when no one else is near, and they do it in descriptive ways so we, the audience, know what they're thinking very clearly. No one talks like this, but the movie thinks they do. Lovecraft wrote like this because he had to convey thoughts and ideas without the aid of visuals or sound, but only through description. This movie has everything it needs to get these points across, but chooses to dole out information as pointed and lacking subtlety as if it were handing out fliers.
There are a lot of concepts and ideas here that just never really gel. There are several mentions by the son character that time has been passing strangely, but we never get the feeling that he is either a) going crazy, or b) actually correct. Just saying something isn't good enough when you're making a movie. Film is a visual medium, you need to be able to convey those thoughts and ideas using more than just expository dialogue. This is a terrible screenplay, and that is the biggest thing this movie has going against it. The rest of the movie had just enough creativity going for it that I felt like I was climbing uphill just to enjoy it. I ultimately did, but no thanks to this terrible dialogue.
All-in-all, I did actually enjoy this movie in spite of my plentiful gripes. It's a maddening sort of thing to watch, never really living up to itself. Nic Cage is as fun here as he pretty much can be at this point, I liked the color palette and (sometimes) the visuals. I had fun watching this, but it was a disaster. Richard Stanley has never really been a good director, and his retirement didn't cure him of that, but I am definitely more interested in seeing messy movies like this than more Disney-produced crap that all feels safe and boring. Is it a good movie? Absolutely not. But it's a unique one, and sometimes that's all I need.
Rating: Probably like a 5/10? Maybe a 6/10, because I did laugh quite a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment