Directed by Steven Knight — Screenplay by Steven Knight.
Steven Knight’s Serenity follows Baker Dill (played by Matthew McConaughey), a fishing boat captain living on the relatively secluded Plymouth Island. Dill is obsessed with catching a tuna that he nicknames ‘Justice,’ and when he isn’t smoking, fishing, or drinking, he spends time with Diane Lane’s character, ‘Constance.’ One day, Dill’s ex-wife Karen (played by Anne Hathaway) shows up and begs him to take her new husband, Frank (played by Jason Clarke), out on the water and have him killed for abusing her and Dill and Karen’s son. As Dill contemplates whether or not he should do it, he starts to question the nature of his own reality. Since this isn’t a new release, and since I’d like to address the craziness of this film directly, this is going to be more of a spoiler review, best read after you’ve seen the film.
“Why has the creator changed the rules?” — That’s both a line from the movie and one of the many questions that come up the moment you start thinking about the plot, even a little bit. So, yeah, this is a movie set inside a video game, with video game characters programmed or created by a teenager who hates his abusive stepfather. It is a wild experience, and that question hits right at the center of some of the narrative confusion present in the film. Other questions include: did the son program his AI/video game/simulation father to sell his video game-fisherman body for sex to Diane Lane? Who programmed Jeremy Strong’s “I am the rules” character, if the son didn’t? What mechanism in the game made everyone desperate to stop the ridiculously named “Baker Dill” from doing as the game creator wished? And for what purpose? What would happen if he caught the fish? That couldn’t just magically stop the real-life son, right?
But I digress. There are a lot of things here that either don’t make sense or are foolishly underexplained. That said, I do think the idea that this is an ‘Old Man and the Sea’ meets neo-noir story, but with a “set inside of a video game” twist, to be intriguing, and that it could work. It’s just that the other aspects of the execution and the details of the game creator’s story aren’t thought through. I enjoyed the aspect that the supporting characters are paper-thin, poorly written, all-knowing beings because they’re poorly designed NPCs. But that is maybe the only poorly written aspect of the film that can be properly described as ‘a feature, not a bug.’
Performance-wise, Hathaway, whom I always like, isn’t good in this. But I’m willing to excuse that because, you could argue, the reason she is playing this poorly written neo-noir femme fatale this way is that she is deliberately trying to play it as an NPC programmed poorly. That could be a reach, though, on my part. McConaughey’s performance isn’t outright bad, even though it feels generic. It feels wrong for them both to have been nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards (the Razzies are a parody awards show that singles out the worst films in Hollywood), when you could argue there is a reason for them feeling odd baked into the script. Jeremy Strong’s strange, nerdy performance as the human manifestation of game rules is also just really entertaining. It isn’t necessarily because it is a good performance, but once you recognize what this film is doing, you can, sort of, have fun with it.
It’s a headscratcher of a film that feels like a blend of Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling, the latter of which was released a few years after Serenity was released, and with some generic neo-noir and ‘Old Man and the Sea’ sprinkled on top. It’s definitely not a good movie, but it may be one of the perfect examples of a movie that is so bonkers and bad that it is actually really entertaining despite itself
4.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
