Written by Luke Barnes
Summary
An ode to Hollywood that really didn’t understand the assignment.
This film did the impossible, it gave us a rare bad Jessie Plemons performance; a thing until recently I thought impossible. However, I will contextualise that point as no one is really good in this film as such how can anyone be bad? More so it is shades of average in terms of performance. Jason Segel is the most palatable, and it is nice to see him giving a straight dramatic performance without making dumb jokes. Lily Colins is just playing herself, it would have been more interesting to have cast Plemons’s real life wife Kristen Dunst in the role and played it that way but hey Colins is married to the director and that has to have some perks right? Plemons just seems tired here, there are a few scenes where it looks like he is going to give it his all but then he seems to run out of steam.
As I mentioned in the summary this film opens like a classic Hollywood picture and has the ego to think that it is the modern incarnation, but the noir esque sensibilities quickly get lost along the way as the film devolves into a very basic crime/ hostage film. Moreover, if the ending was going for shocking then it failed at that too as almost everyone must have seen that twist coming from a million miles away.
Overall, more drab fare for Netflix soon to be forgotten about.
Pros.
Segel is palatable
It is watchable if dull
Cons.
Colins
Plemons
It feels derivative
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