Delayed Reaction: Serenity

Premise: A fisherman gets hired by his ex to kill her abusive husband.

When it comes to bad movies, confidence is the thing that really sets them apart. A lot of movies are incompetently made. The pieces barely fit together. The performances are amateurish. The filmmaker's understanding of the basics of filmmaking are suspect. Most bad movies are simply forgotten. I haven't thought about Need for Speed or Transformers: The Last Knight since I saw them. When a bad movie is made with incredible confidence, that's how you get Showgirls or The Room. These are movies that aren't just bad. They put everything that's bad about them front and center under the belief that those things are its greatest assets.

Serenity is a great bad movie. The kind people build drinking games out of or build midnight screenings for. It's so bad, that there will be people who tie themselves into knots to find a way to call it a secret masterpiece. It's not the worst movie ever made. Those are the wrong terms to think of it in. It ranks high as one of the most boldly bad movies though.

As with all of my Delayed Reactions, I'm assuming it's fair game to spoil this movie. And I will. The fatal flaw of Serenity is that it thinks its twist can sustain the movie. The twist? It's all a video game. That's supposed to excuse the underwritten storyline and the thinly constructed characters. And, in a version of this movie where the mystery really did hook me, I could see forgiving all that. I didn't care at all about what was going on though. I half-guessed the video game angle early on, then ignored the thought because that would be stupid. That meant I spend the rest of the movie looking for anything else to latch onto. In a vacuum, Matthew McConaughey's performance could've worked. In a world in which he's been doing those insane Lincoln commercials for 5 years, what he's doing in Serenity is basically parody. I was weirdly fine with Anne Hathaway who is great at being in on the joke. After people turned on her earlier in the decade, essentially for trying too hard, instead of responding with nothing but grounded roles, she's just as often owned the reputation and leaned completely into camp. I mean, Serenity, The Hustle, and Ocean's Eight are the roles of someone who has heard what you said about her.

People have tried to crack the "trapped inside a video game" formula for years. Tron just focused on the style of the world. The Matix sequels (computer, not video game) took a lot of grief because they went too deep into the idea. The last two Jumanji movies used the idea as a means to an end only. Then there's Pixels. Enough said. And there are many others. Serenity attempts to use the "uncanny valley" aspect of video games - the fact that characters in a game don't pass the Turing Test - to make a mystery thriller. It boldly misses the mark though.

And, I'm not even going to attempt to understand the logic of how McConaughey in the game comes into contact with his son in real life. I think the answer is that the boy reprogrammed the game, but the whole thing feels like the tail wagging the dog.

I appreciate how nuts this movie is. It didn't half-ass what was trying to do. I took a big swing and missed big. It's a bad movie. At least it's interestingly bad though.

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend