PREMISE
A “Man From the Future” arrives at a diner in Los Angeles, where he must recruit the precise combination of disgruntled patrons to join him on a one-night quest to save the world from the terminal threat of a rogue artificial intelligence.
THE GOOD STUFF
SAM F****** ROCKWELL- This is a golden performance. A performance that is so good and so strong that whenever he’s not on screen, the movie suffers a little bit in terms of its entertainment value. You can say that this is a one-note performance, but that’s welcome in a movie like this that is so batshit crazy in every other facet of its presentation. Rockwell’s always been a person who has played eccentric characters, and this is no different. I want to say this may be the first performance of his that is flat-out acerbic, but he is a joy to watch at all times in this film.
THE MAIN STORY- This film is presented in an anthology-ish type of story structure that tells the stories of the secondary characters in the film. This is done for no other reason than to emphasize the film’s underlying message. In between these individual stories, we get the film’s main plot, which is at once tense, hilarious, and creatively executed. The linear “ticking clock” plot structure that the main story follows would have been an entertaining movie in and of itself. That being said…..
THE FIRST & SECOND STORIES- The first side story, dealing with the characters played by Zazie Beetz and Michael Pena, and the second story with Juno Temple, are essentially really well-done short episodes of Black Mirror to go along with all the zaniness that the main plot has to give. These two stories are about as grim as black comedy gets in mainstream Cinema. These are also funny, and in the case of the Juno Temple story… bizarrely sad as well. Temple really has the most to do here, in terms of the emotional weight her character has to carry. She has to play an extremely serious character in a very goofy movie, and that couldn’t have been easy.
THE THIRD ACT- This movie really closes fantastically. Of course, I can’t give away spoilers, but I will say that I couldn’t help but wonder, with all the chaotic stuff that happens over the runtime, how this movie was going to end plausibly without any cop-out BS? There’s SO MUCH CRAZY S*** that happens in the last 15 to 20 minutes of this movie that the fact that they actually land the plane and make it make sense is beyond plausible.
THE BAD STUFF
THE STORY STRUCTURE- The moral of this film is that technology poisons your mind and ultimately leads you to be the worst version of yourself. I’ll give director Gore Verbinski credit for knowing how to slam-dunk this message in a variety of ways by using a story structure like this one. But it just wasn’t necessary. To make your film in this manner is to indulge in the hot-shot film auteur aggrandising that tends to make basic stories look way more important than they are. Because of the way this story is structured, this movie is, in fact, around the 2-hour and 20-minute mark. And if there were no filler due to this storytelling method, there would be no complaints from me. However, there is something that did not need to be here, something that is completely filler and would have saved the running time of this movie about 15 or so minutes, and it is:
THE UGLY STUFF
THE THIRD STORY- By the time this story shows up, it’s about an hour into the film, and the messages that this story has to say have already been stated and doubled down on in the plot by the time the story is told. Haley Lu Richardson does a really good job throughout this movie, especially in this section… but why is this even here? Given the twist at the end of the film, this particular story of hers becomes completely unimportant.
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Furthermore, the backstory of the Sam Rockwell character (that does not have a name, by the way) is told in such a broken way that I can’t help but assume it’s intended to set up a sequel.
It’s not that this doesn’t tell a complete story, because it does. But the most important story to tell in all these short black mirror-ish backstories littering this movie is the main character’s backstory. If you were to make a sequel to this, you could dig into the main character’s backstory enough to make another feature out of it. You can do that too. There are so many opportunities to extend this beyond its limits, and honestly, I don’t know why that is.
I can’t help but feel that Gore Verbinski made this because he wanted to make statements about the way society is going. And he did that. But then, along the way, I think maybe the studio came in and wanted to franchise-ify things, and at this point, I think movie fans can just tell when that’s being shamelessly done. That being said, I kinda hope it happens. This is really fun, gloriously R-Rated, and a really good mindf*** of a film.
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE is in theaters now