This movie is on Peacock, it has audio description, the description is fine, and the movie is awful. Emile Hirsch is stuck in this, and we owe him an apology. I think he got sucked into movies this terrible because we did not give him his much deserved Oscar nomination for Into The Wild. Into The Wild, at last glance, was still in the IMDB Top 250, because most people have realized it is a terrific film that we missed the boat on and thought it only needed a Hal Holbrook nomination. Granted, that is a fantastic nomination, but now Emile Hirsch is starring in barely coherent films that are being shot on shoestring budgets full of people no one has ever seen before, likely filmed in Eastern Europe somewhere to save money.
Hirsch plays a guy with a sketchy past, and a girlfriend. He’s working at this store on the side of the road on the way to Mexico, fixing up a car.It’s not his, but he’s fixing it for some guys. Then, out of almost nowhere, some cops show up. They are friendly at first, then they notice the car, question Hirsch, and then do an illegal search of the vehicle, popping the trunk and finding a bag with some damning evidence. Then, later after being grilled by the two corrupt.idiot cops, his lawyer advises him to take a plea, despite that they have zero evidence other than he was working on a car he said wasn’t his, that had something in the trunk. Not everyone opens peoples shit in the trunk when they are working under the hood.
Then, he goes to a mental hospital, and is out super quick, but whatever happened to him in there is causing his reality to change all the time. he can’t tell what is true anymore. Is he even still in a movie? should Emile Hirsch try something else? Questions that must be answered.
This movie is aggressively awful, with inept direction that seeks to intentionally bamboozle its audience as a show of skill, not realizing that better directors have been able to have plots like Memento, messing with what is real and what isn’t, and actually make it not suck. This director is less talented than the gum on the bottom of Christopher Nolan’s shoe. but it does feel like someone watched Memento, somehow got funding, and tried to one up the master. No.
The only reason this film doesn’t have a F grade is because Hirsch tries really hard with every scene, every line of awful dialogue, in every scene he has with someone who can’t act. He has been better, but my God is he trying. Save Emile Hirsch. After initially watching this film, because we are in the middle of a political campaign, I imagined me being at a town hall for one of the candidates, and getting the microphone and asking “What is your plan to get Emile Hirsch back into films that are worthy of his talent, so he doesn’t end up in another State Of Consciousness?”
Final Grade: D-
