In the 1970s a drug fueled Private Investigator “Doc” is taken on a very strange adventure after his girlfriend leaves him.
This film is 148 minutes too long. Honestly though I cannot get over the running time, especially when hardly anything note worthy actually happens in the film. Very poor is the first thing I can come up with for this review. I just cannot understand who thinks it’s a good idea to release this type of film to the cinemas. Although the screening I was at in the UK on opening night had about 20 people with 8 walking out at different times during it.
What makes it worse to say this film was awful and pointless was that it has a very talented cast. Who cannot even save it, Reese Witherspoon needed much more screen time in my opinion, although you could pretty much take her character out of the film and it wouldn’t make a massive difference at all.
Plenty of drugs are taken during the course of the film and Doc certainly has more than his fair share of them. Making some scenes just totally off the wall, but not in a good or entertaining way. Actually maybe I shouldn’t sound that harsh with that as I did laugh out loud a couple of times, yet unsure whether I was actually laughing at something that was supposed to be funny?
Joaquin Phoenix has had his problems in recent years, maybe this strange character wasn’t too much of a push for him? It’s a bit of a shame really as I have always been a fan of Phoenix and looked forward to seeing him in more films. This one did not really give me anything either. He does his best to carry off some awful material, the funniest moment had to be his scream at a photo. Which was quite early on in the film, but nothing ever really beat that moment.
This really does have to be one of the toughest reviews I have ever had to write as after watching the film I am actually unsure to what the whole point of it was? I tried my best to really pay attention and found it interesting when they started to explain what the inherent vice was but then that it didn’t actually link?!?!
Josh Brolin hasn’t had a very good run of films in recent years, after some promising roles. Let’s hope he can pick back up after this one. I am very surprised to see the high ratings on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, so if anyone who has voted high can please comment on this post and give me some insight into why exactly?
Don’t get me wrong I am not sure if it was just the film that struggled or if it was actually the awful story. Which tried to shock and have plenty of different twists throughout along with trying to build up the story to appear to have layers. But it just ended up a mess with lots of different actors popping up in the film for a little while and then they were gone.
So basically after trying to put together my thoughts on this off the wall crazy film, I am just left trying to work out the point of it and . . . why?
