Fisherman Baker Dill is tempted by his ex-wife to kill her abusive husband for 10 million dollars, but there’s more to the situation than meets the eye.
So, it’s been well documented that this movie was received terribly at all its test screenings, which led to a vote of no confidence from distribution company Aviron Pictures, subsequently canning the marketing associated with this movie.
This movie is written and directed by Steven Knight, the same man who helmed Tom Hardy in Locke (2013). But I’m almost convinced that someone else directed it because both films are polar opposites in quality. Locke is an outstandingly unique drama. Serenity on the other hand is a tendentious disaster.
There’s very little about Serenity that I enjoyed. The cast is good, but they’re far above this unflappably ridiculous script. Matthew McConaughey and Djimon Hounsou make an okay effort at characterisation, but unfortunately I can’t say the same for Anne Hathaway and Jason Clarke. The former is so hideously stoic and the latter is just a corrosively over the top ‘villain’. It’s the worst I’ve ever seen them.
That’s two different doses of ‘bad’ among many, because this is the issue with Serenity and why I refer to it as a tendentious disaster. This movie frequently embodies all kinds of bad movies. One moment it is hilarious due to vomit-worthy dialogue, the next moment it becomes overly convoluted thanks to a screenplay that is divested of any meaningful character building or narrative cohesion, and another moment I’ll be frustrated because its world has no internal logic to comprehend.
It’s a movie that has a brazen tendency to suck. There’s no good scene. The performances feel so uneven in energy and intention. The movie features a twist that M. Night Shyamalan would grin at. I won’t ruin said twist, but it lost me immediately.
I was bombarded with a huge heap of questions concerning the internal logic of this world. I was clueless as to what the rules were, how it actually functioned and how it could actually be conceived by the ludicrous circumstances surrounding it.
Serenity is one of the worst films of 2019, hands down. When the movie is busy being plagued with script and tonal issues, even the technical components of this movie just never came together. There’s an incredibly obnoxious shot that’s used where the camera would spin from the back of a character around to their front and it’s very jarring because of the diaphanous CGI on display.
The editing is choppy and I never felt like the scenes, character motives and plot beats flowed coherently into one another. I couldn’t take this movie seriously because of how broken it was.
It’s a mixture of hilarity, confusion and frustration. It truly is a terrible film. Steer clear!
P.S. Why the excessive shots of McConaughey’s rear? There’s a lot.
Written by Seán Mac G.
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