Short Review: I wish they owned a better story.

This film opens with one of the more gratuitous sex scenes in recent memory. Joaquin Phoenix and Eva Mendes grope on a couch immediately following the opening credits. One expects that with such vivid content being thrust (pun intended) at the audience in the beginning of a film there will be context to follow. Nope. No such context is provided. The two actors are asked by director James Gray to suffer the indignity and embarrassment of a sex scene for nothing other than to satisfy his bad film making impulses. Any time you see a sex scene in a film, it may seem like its fun and exciting. Now, of course, some actors will claim this is the case. If you've ever seen one of these things being shot, its a miserable thing, in particular for many actors. You have to lay there with another person who you may or may not know all that well and if you know them you may or may not even like them all that much. The actors then have to portray two people making "the beast with two backs" while taking direction, reshooting moves and waiting for lighting to get corrected. All of this while being half naked as the crew look on, bored, waiting to get a chance to sneak out for a smoke. When I see a sex scene like the one that opens this movie, its offensive when it is so clearly unneeded not only because the audience is asked to sit and watch but also because the cast and crew had to endure creating it. Perhaps Ms. Mendez and Mr. Phoenix wouldn't complain about having to do the scene but the audience should.

This whole movie is one long bad choice. The story follows Bobby (Phoenix) a successful nightclub owner who gets involved with drug dealers. Bobby's has a secret, his brother (Mark Wahlberg) and father (Robert Duvall) are both cops who are hunting down the aforementioned drug dealers. Following the shooting of his brother, Bobby turns on the dealers and works with the cops. People get shot, there's plenty of yelling and double crossing - all leading to the inevitable big shoot out at the end. Yawn. There is nothing about this story that is compelling, fresh or worthy of an audience's time. The script, also by Gray, is a tone deaf ramble written by someone who not only doesn't understand how to manage dialog but also scene progression. Combined with his timid directing style, this piece whimpers through its nearly two-hour run time.

There is a single sequence which works well in this film and that is a car chase scene. I thought it was well handled and shot. This sequence sticks out however since it is the solitary item of good film making in this whole production. The talents of the cast, all of whom are top-notch, are completely wasted on the listless dialog they're forced to spew. Any personal sacrifices made by anyone in the making of this film are wasted and those who were talked into financing the film should have put their money elsewhere.

I get many complaints that I'm too harsh on movies I don't like. Maybe I can be at times. But a poorly made film that is intended to be serious, like this one wants to be, are wasteful things. They gobble up resources and the efforts of the cast and crew who more often than not are asked to put in long hours and hard work to get a film like this made. Bad movies also consume time from the audience that could have otherwise been spent doing something worthwhile. How would you like it if I were to stop you on the street and tell you a long story only to find out I didn't have a point, I just stopped you to ramble - this is what bad movies do to us each time we sit through them. They put our lives on hold and give us nothing back for the investment. Life is short and bad movies make our precious time here just that less enjoyable. This is why I loathe bad movies and attack them. They are offensive.


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Walk the Line (2005)


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