Sarah Hates Your Movie

It’s baffling that this is a film that exists. Really. I just can’t imagine how it got made. Despite an impressive cast list, everyone turns in bewildering performances, and the script is just… gibberish. (Literally, it’s gibberish. The White River Kid himself constantly refers to the people he’s killed as, er, “woollygumps”, or something similar.)  

Lots of things happen, but the plot isn’t linear, if it exists at all: so there’s Bob Hoskins, doing some weird transatlantic accent, playing a con man who dresses as a priest and sells socks. He’s picked up an illegal Mexican immigrant, Antonio Banderas, whose English isn’t good enough for him to tell the difference between “immigration” and “litigation”, but is good enough for him to learn everything in the huge law book he’s acquired and use it to run his own blackmailing racket. The criminal duo somehow manage to pick up Wes Bentley, the titular White River Kid, a murderous orphan with a butterfly tattooed on his cheek who can apparently breathe underwater. He and his girlfriend persuade Hoskins and Banderas to drive them to the girlfriend’s parents house in the middle of nowhere and… there’s something about a blind prostitute who isn’t actually blind and NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE. It wants to be a madcap comedy but it’s actually just a mishmash of random incomprehensible nonsense. 

This might be the worst thing I’ve watched as part of my Wes Bentley Season.

How many framing devices can one film possibly need? There Be Dragons starts with a text crawl, moves onto the introduction of a character who only exists to discover a story, and then throws a voiceover into the mix (an unreliable voiceover at that, which recounts scenes the narrator wasn’t privy to - or only heard about through letters). It’s incredibly convoluted.

The film purports to be about Josemaría Escrivá, a newly minted saint who founded Opus Dei back in the 20s. But instead, much of its runtime is taken up with the story of Roberto and Manolo Torres: Manolo knew Escrivá when they were kids, and Roberto wants to write a book about him, so he overcomes his lifelong hatred of his father long enough to have a deathbed chat about his life.

The idea, ultimately, is to have their lives intertwine with various other people and world events, and prove Escrivá’s point, that God is everywhere, and living a good life - particularly with regard to loving and forgiving others - is the best way to honour Him.

Frustratingly, the film just doesn’t work. It’s too much. There are too many characters, too many events, and too much time to cover. There’s no way to make it all work. Writer/director Joffé compounds the complications of his script with an ever-moving camera that’s constantly grabbing reflections or framing characters in odd ways, which is initially fascinating but quickly distracts from everything else that’s going on.

There Be Dragons is ambitious, in its way, but it falls far too far short of what it needs to be. It should be an epic story of love and betrayal and hope and pain, and it should go all out for all of those things, but at every turn it holds back, perhaps for fear of seeming ridiculous. But you’ve got to be kind of ridiculous to make something like this work. You’ve got to be fearless. The countless framing devices seem like ways to distance the film from the deeply held beliefs of its characters; they’re safety nets, but they end up serving as barriers between the audience and any kind of real emotion.

When did we stop making films this lavish? The Four Feathers is gorgeous. It’s just amazing to look at. And although you have to entirely shut up the part of your brain that doesn’t think colonialism was awesome, it’s kind of fun, too?

The four feathers of the title are symbols of cowardice, handed to Harry Faversham (Heath Ledger) on the day he resigns his commission from the army because his regiment is about to be sent to the Sudan. Three of them are from his fellow officers; one is from his fiancée. Even his family disown him. When everyone else is sent off to fight the Mahdi, Harry languishes at home… and then decides to ship out to the Sudan anyway, disguising himself as an Arab and accidentally joining the other side.

After a big, climactic battle in which many of the English are killed, he manages to rescue some of his friends, and proves himself a hero after all. It’s based on a novel written in 1902, and although it relies heavily on coincidence it’s kind of exciting. It’s easy to go along with the story, despite its politics.

Except! There’s a subplot going on with Harry’s fiancée, Ethne, who picks up with Harry’s best friend Jack (Wes Bentley) after breaking things off with Harry. Jack’s always been in love with her, and writes her many tender letters from the battlefield, intending to propose when he gets home. Sadly, he ends up blinded in a battle, and then when he gets home and asks Ethne to marry him, Harry rocks up  and runs off with her. Poor Wes Bentley. Blind *and* forever alone. That kind of sours the happy ending, especially because Jack wasn’t even one of the guys who sent the feathers to Harry in the first place. Other than that, though, it’s all heroism and glory past the finish line.

Sometimes, you sit down to watch a movie and you think ‘how bad could it be?’, right? And sometimes, the answer to that question is: very bad. Hirokin is a very bad film.

Despite the subtitle, it’s not about samurai. It’s set on a desert planet where humans are killing off or enslaving an alien race who, helpfully, are only distinguishable from humans because their veins show through the palms of their hands. (Seriously.)

The Hirokin of the title is a brooding half-human, half-alien (Wes Bentley with hair extensions), and as such he’s the only person who can save the day and unite the tribes. There’s a lot of wannabe-Star Wars training in “the way”, and then there’s a big swordfight, and the end doesn’t really make any sense. It feels long, incredibly long, because nothing really happens and it’s really badly structured and everyone mumbles so it’s almost impossible to even know what they’re talking about.

There are some really nice landscape shots, but that doesn’t really make this worthwhile.

Stephen King’s short story of rage and revenge gets dragged out to an impossibly long 89 minutes. The last ten minutes or so are kind of fun, but the rest of it is incredibly tedious.

Hey you know what’s a really good way to sell weird and depressing films about broken people hurting one another? PACKAGE IT LIKE A ROMANTIC COMEDY.

In The Last Word, Wes Bentley plays Evan, a depressed writer who makes a living composing poems for use in suicide notes. (Is that even legal?) When he goes to the funeral of one of his clients, he meets the guy’s grieving, alcohol-abusing sister who - naturally! - throws herself at him, and they begin an awkward romance built entirely on lies. By the end of it, they’re both considerably more miserable than they were before. It’s kind of heartbreaking.

There’s some fun stuff in there with Ray Romano’s character, a suicidal composer who dreams of owning a cliff for people to throw their broken gadgets off, and the ending is almost halfway upbeat, but… wow, this was not the fluffy comedy the box promised.

If you’d tracked down a serial killer, the best thing to do would probably be to call the police. Not Mickey Gravatski, though. He decides the best thing to do is to make a documentary about him, and ends up hopelessly entangled with the killer’s life and crimes. A lot of interesting parallels are drawn between the killer’s compulsion to murder and Mickey’s drug addiction (there are at least two scenes where this comparison is made painfully obvious) but it never quite works. Despite the actors’ best efforts, the film never quite manages to sell the idea that anyone, ever, no matter who they were, would go along with a murderer in order to make a film. It’s kind of hopeless. 

It’s difficult to give a film like this a star rating. It’s a complete oddity. For starters, it’s overtly stagey: the set up is that three strangers end up getting trapped in the underground laundry room of their apartment building on the hottest day of the summer, so it’s essentially a film about three people in one room.

The premise sounds like maybe it’ll become a low budget thriller of some sort, as they try to escape and maybe face some kind of physical hardships, and indeed the film seems like it’s going to go in that direction for a little while, as the electricity cuts out, there’s only a limited amount of food (and no bathroom) available, and the possibility that the basement will flood looms.

But then things start getting kind of weird. The dynamic between the three strangers continually shifts, and none of them act rationally, at all. Within about an hour of getting trapped, they’re all acting as if this is a life and death situation, when actually it seems pretty likely that someone will be along to let them out before too much longer. (The scene in which Julian and Moriat have sex, writhing in a chair without ever actually getting undressed, while Nora reads from the newspaper, is bewildering.) It sounds terrible, and yet somehow it’s compulsively watchable, perhaps because all the actors seem to have committed so fully to their roles.

So it’s a shame that the ending is the worst cliche in the book, the ultimate cop-out. (It should’ve been obvious, but I think the fact that I’d seen Soul Survivors so recently kept me from realising; I didn’t want to think another film would do something so bloody annoying!) It’s kind of terrible, then, ultimately. But it had its moments, and it wasn’t boring, so it gets points for that. 

It’s a shame this movie is such a failure. You can kind of see what they were trying to do with it - the stuff about eternal beauty, poetry, mysticism, sex, obsession, and so on - and there’s some nice photography and snappy dialogue, but it just doesn’t work. It’s deliberately stylised and gothic, of course, but the modern setting just makes nonsense of it all, and there are so many unnecessary horror cliches jammed in that the actual story starts to get lost.

Dull dull dullsville dull.

Good Bentley beard work, though.