Delayed Reaction: Colossal

The Pitch: It's like a monster movie as an obvious metaphor, then not so much an obvious metaphor.

A woman discovers that she has the ability to cause a monster to appear and attack Soeul.

I going to need more time to gestate my thoughts about this movie. My initial response to it was negative, but it was negative in a way that the movie kind of intended. I'm still unpacking how much of it is dislike and how much is a response to an effective movie.

I guess I'll start with this. I love that this movie doesn't care to explain much. The mistake that a lot of writers make with a high concept is the belief that they have to explain it. That's not always true. Harold Crick doesn't need to know how he's a character in Karen Eiffel's book (**). Tim doesn't need to know why the men in his family have the ability to time-travel (**). In Colossal, Gloria doesn't need to know why a lightning bolt (I guess) made a monster appear when she goes to a specific plot of land. My whole One Big Leap principle is built on the idea that I'm watching a movie, so I need to suspend my belief about something. Colossal smartly, doesn't get bogged down explaining the high concept. Anne Hathaway (and Jason Sudeikis) controls a monster. Fine. That's all I need to know, given what the movie becomes.

What writer/director Nacho Vigalonodo does with the premise is interesting. It's not quite a From Dusk Till Dawn fake out, but it's a pretty significant shift. It's really a story about damaged people and whether they let that damage ruin them. Hathaway's Gloria has a lot of issues. She wants to be better than those issue though. Sudeikis' Oscar doesn't care to improve. He's fine being controlled by self-loathing. My big issue with the movie is that I think it was more concerned with tricking the audience about Oscar than building a good character. It goes overboard to make Oscar the traditional "nice guy" early on, then goes equally overboard with his heel turn later on. I had a hard time buying the character from the beginning as the one at the end or what exactly was being said about the character. Enough else worked that I can forgive that. Sudeikis makes the character work with his performance in individual moment though. He's one of those SNL alums who doesn't always look like he's itching to play a new character or get a laugh. I've been waiting to see him play more characters with some menace.

Hathaway really makes the movie though. She's proven before that she can play a train wreck (Rachel Getting Married, good god!), so this was no surprise. She sells some moments that, when you think about them, are really ridiculous. The whole climax is a little silly, with her going to Seoul and miming what she's doing to Sudeikis. She dispatches of him in a pretty brutal way and responds to it accordingly.

I'm very undecided about the movie. I'm definitely in favor of it at this point. It's just a matter of how much. For now, I'm going to stick with saying that it's fun and clever, with a much darker edge than I expected but a little rough when the story turns.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend