A good movie

Since I have always been a big fan of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s work, of course, I was really eager to check his last directorial effort. On top of that, this time, he was working with Tom Cruise, a huge star who had been working mostly on big action blockbusters for a while now. Unfortunately for Iñárritu and Cruise, it seemed that their ambitious movie would become a huge flop and, well, it was hardly surprising. Indeed, it was such a dark comedy with some fairly complex meta elements, there was no way that the mainstream audience would embrace it. The reactions had been rather lukewarm at best but I actually enjoyed the damned thing. In my opinion, Iñárritu and Cruise managed to do here something that ‘Don't Look Up’ tried but ultimately failed to do a couple of years ago. Not everything did work though. The first thing that really bothered me was the fact that, even though this movie was dealing with decadence and excess, yet, they used up such a huge budget (+$150 millions) which was just bewildering. Just for comparison, ‘Birdman’, another post-modern dark satire (Iñárritu should really drop this genre now) also by the same director did cost 10 times less and was therefore a hit. The whole meta aspect was also rather half-baked. It didn’t help that Iñárritu already did something fairly similar with ‘Birdman’ (which was just amazing) but, in this case, it took me a while to really warm up for this gimmicky device. Eventually, I did understand that it allowed us to take even more distance from Digger Rockwell who was played by Curtis Markson who was played by Tom Cruise. It was quite some impressive acting from Cruise but, ultimately we never got the opportunity to connect with Curtis Markson. For some reason, there was also a sub-plot about Curtis Markson’s daughter who was missing during his rehearsal but it was barely developed at all. There were also too many amazing actors who ended up doing pretty much nothing (Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Emma D'Arcy). It was actually pretty impressive though how Jesse Plemons, who also had maybe 2-3 scenes only, still managed to steal the show. And yet, I really enjoyed the damned thing though. I was basically sold when Digger Rockwell made his speech to the European Parliament. Indeed, what the guy said was basically exactly what I think about our current capitalist way of life. Basically, I was completely in the same wavelength of this movie so I thoroughly enjoyed it. Ultimately, it could be seen as a horror movie, as a prophetic prescient tale but, even as a comedy, it was probably the most depressing one ever made (the ending was pretty bleak and chilling). No wonder it didn’t find an audience. So, I did like it, I thought it was really bold but it was obvious that Iñárritu should drop his post-modern shtick and, for Cruise, I’m afraid he will now return to make blockbusters even when he is 80 years old which is too bad because he was actually really good here. 

7/10