Movie Review : Serenity
I have no idea why I opted for this movie to review. I think I saw the trailer after I chose it. Maybe it was the cast (Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou); or that Mr. Steven Knight, writer and director of the film, sounded like something to me. After a quick pass through, I remembered that he was the creator of Peaky Blinders, and writer of the tremendous Eastern Promises (2007), of Cronenberg. Then, checked this information, I surely said: "I could not have chosen wrong."
I was wrong. Serenity (2019) has everything to become a film that, so ridiculous, goes all the way around and becomes revered as a cult viewer. Not as much as The Room (2003), but maybe as Dungeons & Dragons (2000) or Jason X (2001).
The plot focuses on Baker Dill (McConaughey), captain of a fishing vessel obsessed with catching a giant tuna that escaped. In addition, from time to time it takes tourists to the high seas so that they feel strong and rough fishing some shark. However, Dill has a past, which we will know when his ex-wife, Karen Zariakas (Hathaway) arrives. She lives with their son and her new husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), who is a battered drunk full of twine. Then Karen, desperate, asks Dill to take her husband to the high seas and kill him there. He promises to pay him well and on top of that he would be saving his son from a rather horrible life. Among the moral debate that McConaughey raises will be his partner Duke (Hounsou) and his lover Constance (Lane).
They say that walking the cart accommodate the pumpkins. And Serenity goes, walks, moves; But with every decision he makes, a pumpkin falls and shits against the floor. And it is that its protagonists oscillate between the autopilot and a soap opera dramatization that seems to indicate a bigger confusion than that of the spectator. Matthew McConaughey has moments of whispering True Detective style, and then goes on to shout to the sky that generate other people's shame.
Then you have to make a separate point for the script. Because it turns out that the island where the whole movie is developed is actually the creation of Baker Dill's son, a computer genius who sets up a whole virtual world to escape the awful reality he has to live with his mother's husband . This virtual world contemplates certain rules that change ... or not: the truth is that it is difficult to amalgamate the end of the baby by stabbing the pungent drunk and creating that video game so that his fictional father (because in the real world Dill died in Iraq) Kill the same drunk puncher. It is a turn that pretends to be surprising but that, in addition to a little predictable at a given time, is very rare and disconcerting. Even one thinks about McConaughey's sex scenes and has no choice but to reflect on the mental health of the poor baby.
But not only the story is disconcerting, but also Knight's direction. The presentation of Anne Hathaway as femme fatale is one of the least successful decisions of the film. The genre is changing from thriller to metaphysical drama without any modesty, as would a class B production, and not a film with a budget of 25 million dollars and a cast with two Oscar winners.
There is no "In summary ..." to close the note. It is difficult to draw a clear conclusion about the film that I saw, because it consists of so many shaded nuances and so much disorder of ideas that shows the crack of a door that I do not want to open. That door has the question engraved: wasted my time watching this movie?
The answer will not surprise you.
Very nice review.