Woof, where to begin?
A boring, inert, CGI mess helmed by a lead who doesn’t want to be there and couldn’t even carry the film if he wanted to.
The final “Wizard of Oz” sequence has some real visual juice — as well as being a clever nod to the magic of moviemaking — but then we get an ugly CGI showdown that drags down the conclusion.
A huge waste of time that’s so bad I’m genuinely interested in knowing the story of how it got made.
I liked this quite a bit even with its problems: ridiculous accents, 50% of Keanu's performance, underdeveloped elements of the script, like Giovanni Ribisi's character.
Having said that, I think there's a version of this movie that leans into the undeveloped aspect of the story — the ways that men use, abuse and exploit women. The elements are all there — you have at least three characters who represent each of these aspects of male chauvinism and domination — they just needed someone to tie them together in a way that made an impact on the screen.
Plenty of people smarter than me have written about how the movie embeds the message of the legend — what would we do, what would we sacrifice, to give ourselves a story worth telling — into the narrative itself.
I just want to say that I was struck by the preoccupation with death throughout the film. Death as an inevitability, death as something to respect, death as an opportunity for life, death as something that — if we are lucky — we…
