![]() Into this stew arrives his old high school sweetheart, Karen Zariakis (Anne Hathaway), presently married to a wealthy construction magnate or something, Frank (Jason Clarke). When he's not threatening to murder clients, he spends his days angrily bantering with Duke (Djimon Hounsou), his first mate and apparently only friend, or having smug sex with Constance (Diane Lane). Increasingly, though, he's become surly and impatient with his tourists (in the film's first scene he points a gun at one patron's head), for what he really wants to do is spend all of his time and energy hunting a legendary tuna that he's taken to calling Justice. Dill makes most of his money from taking wealthy tourists out game fishing about his boat, named - get ready for this! - named Serenity. Here we find Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), because this is a film which thinks that "Baker Dill" is a good name even for an obvious pseudonym. The setting is Plymouth, a cozy island somewhere in the tropics (it was filmed on Mauritius), though it has the demographics and personality types of a New England fishing village where everybody has been involved in everybody else's business for the last four generations. If there is a constituency for Serenity other than the very forgiving mothers of the people who made it, I cannot even start to imagine who it might consist of. Most awful films, you can still tell what they had in mind and why they thought that this would find a constituency. except I've seen it, and I'm not even sure that I do believe. This is an example of the purest batshit bugfuckery, a movie which cannot even be properly summarised without giving away narrative decisions so horrendous and so unpredictable that it would be both a crime to reveal them, but also maybe be the single biggest selling point for a film that might not quite be "so bad it's good" (it's so bad that it's pretty goddamn bad), but is absolutely the kind of thing that simply must be seen to be believed. And, not for nothing, because the 1990s were the last decade to regular see relative mainstream releases turn out this spectacularly poorly. But more than that, it just feels '90s-esque, in its rhythms and setting and dialogue, even in the way it uses camera movement (the opening shot, a "whoosh" across the surface of the ocean up to a boat, feels particularly old-fashioned). I have no reason for this other than the profound sense that Serenity is a film years and years out of date it's next to impossible to describe its plot without mentioning the names of some prominent late-'90s films, at least one of which would constitute a major spoiler to name it. I know little of the script's history prior to the public announcement of the film's existence in January 2017, but I am compelled to imagine that Knight had been sitting on it for a very long time, waiting until he'd accrued enough favors, clout, and goodwill from the many well-regarded films he's written since making his big splash with 2002's Dirty Pretty Things. The latest of these, pushed back from two different 2018 release dates (one of which was just a week after Life Itself came out the mind reels at thinking of what it would have been like to see both of these in the span of a few days), is Serenity, written and directed by Steven Knight. But we're in a fantastic cycle of movies right now, ones so acutely misguided at their foundation that it's more or less impossible to imagine how even one or two people thought they'd make for successful, audience-pleasing fare, let alone the dozen or more people involved in the pre-production of every movie who are in some position to say, "or, you know, we could not make this film". Over the decades, the Hollywood film industry has been fine-tuned to discourage truly horrible filmmaking, and for most of the 21st Century, the worst of the worst of mainstream cinema has been more on the order of aggressive mediocre rather than actually bad filmmaking. ![]() It's been just a little bit more than two years since Collateral Beauty barfed its way in and out of theaters, and ever since then, it feels like we've been living in a golden age for astonishing cinematic boondoggles.
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