Delayed Reaction: The Unforgivable

Premise: After serving 20 years in prison for killing a cop, a woman tries to rebuild her life and maybe see her younger sister again.

 

I know I’m supposed to look at every film on its own merits. I had too many questions though about this movie, and looking up the British mini-series that this was based on and the pre-production for this explained a lot of my concerns. First of all, this movie feels like a mini-series. There are a lot of moving parts in it with Sandra Bullock’s Ruth trying to rebuild her like, possibly starting a relationship with Jon Bernthal’s Blake, getting a lawyer to help her track down her sister (Aisling Franciosi), the dynamics of the sister’s adopted family, and the sons of the dead cop deciding to get revenge of Ruth. Oh, and the sons’ family drama, and the sister working through unformed memories of Ruth, and the big reveal. This would make way more sense with 6-10 episodes of breathing room (or at least three like the original mini-series), like a Sharp Objects or even looser-formed like a Rectify. We are way past the point where a 1h52m movie should be struggling to give Viola Davis something to do. No, if you have Viola Davis, she gets more to do. The beats of the story don’t really fit a film structure.

 

Looking at the plot of the British mini-series makes more sense too. The Ruth character is 17 when she goes to jail and serves for 15 years. It’s not so weird that she would have a young sister who she is surrogate mother too. The Unforgivable film really struggles to make the ages work. Bullock is 57. They up her prison sentence to 20 years. Even if we knock off 10 years for good genes, that puts Bullock into her mid-20s at the time of the inciting event. With a 17-year-old, I understand the situation snowballing so poorly. A teenager can’t adopt her 5-year-old sister. There’s no way she’d be able to secure a job to figure out a living situation. And she’d be much more likely to escalate the situation simply due to not having enough life experience. Move the Ruth character to her mid-20s and it all makes less sense. She’d probably have a job and be in a much more stable situation. It’s hard for me to look at Bullock in the flashbacks and see an overwhelmed young woman. This also messes with the sister’s situation too. The math means that Aisling Franciosi is supposed to be 25 in the film. Even factoring in the car accident, everything about her situation from the recital to the sister makes Franciosi feel like a young college student, not a grad student or later. A 15-year sentence like the series puts the sister at 20-years-old, which is how she’s written here. Apparently, Angelina Jolie was originally set to play Ruth. At 46, she makes a bit more sense, but not really.

 

This movie was doomed by bad adaptation decisions and incorrect casting. All the actors are fine in it. Bullock gives a good performance. Bernthal is quite charming. Davis is good in her few scenes. There isn’t a real weak performance except perhaps the cop’s sons. They are all just trying to make something work that can’t, given the pieces.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Finch

Premise: In a post-apocalyptic world, a man builds a robot to take care of his dog in case he dies.

 

One thing absolutely doesn’t computer with me about this movie. It’s wasn’t made sometime after March 2020. I wasn’t prepared for that fact. Over the last 2 years, I’ve gotten used to COVID production limitations. Even if not always consciously, I’ve factored the small crowd sizes and isolated locations into my viewing. Sometimes it’s a character skyping in for half a season. Other times it’s The White Lotus getting made simply because they could isolate the Hawaiian set to limit exposure. So, I watch Finch Immediately assuming that Tom Hanks opted to kill some time in this little Sci-Fi production that’s just him, a dog, and maybe one actor in a green CGI suit for 98% of the time. It turns out this was shot in 2019 in what turned out to be COVID-production conditions. This broke my brain and I’m still putting it back together.

 

The movie is decent though. It feels a little too familiar. The robot in this is a less annoying Chappie. The man and his dog remind me of I Am Legend and a half-dozen other movies I’m forgetting. There’s bits of The Road and The Martian in there too. At the end of the day, it’s still Tom Hanks in the lead role, so he makes it work. It’s a minor effort though. I assume the robot effects weren’t cheap, but this otherwise feels like a Sundance Sci-Fi movie like Z for Zachariah or I Am Mother which uses isolation to keep costs down even more than for story reasons. The robot didn’t annoy me, which is actually quite an accomplishment after how much Chappie soured me on the idea. They could’ve done more with the dog…You know what? That’s it. The movie needed more dog. It should’ve been the third star of the movie more than a prominent supporting role.

 

That said, major thanks to the movie for not killing the dog. 10 minutes in, hoping the dog wouldn’t die took 90% of my capacity to absorb the movie.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Don’t Look Up

Premise: Two scientists discover a comet heading to destroy Earth in 6 months and struggle to get the world to take it seriously.

 

Believe it or not, I was actually optimistic about this movie. I hated The Big Short and Vice because I found them insufferably smug and patronizing. There are good things about those movies though. They have huge ensembles of talented performers. They could be very darkly funny. I was hoping that by turning to a wholly fictional story, the “I told you so” energy of Adam McKay’s last two movies would be missing. That would only leave the things I liked.

 

Nope. It turns out he hates fictional people just as much as real people.

 

Sadly, I don’t have much new to say about Don’t Look Up that I didn’t already say about The Big Short and Vice. It’s a movie about how McKay is smarter than everyone else and if you don’t like his movie then you are one of the idiots he’s making fun of. It so damn lazy.

 

The tone of McKay’s movies reminds me a lot of that infamous Crossfire episode with Jon Stewart laying into Tucker Carlson. While it was cathartic to watch in the moment, it always felt disingenuous. Stewart laid into Carlson for not taking his job of informing people seriously enough. When Carlson countered that Stewart had a responsibility to people too, Stewart hid behind the “I’m on a comedy show” excuse. That always struck me as a cop out. Stewart knew that what he said on his show carried weight and that beneath the jokes, he was actually informing people. He was asking for other people to be taken seriously while absolving himself of the same responsibility.

 

Don’t Look Up is the same idea. It’s a movie about how politics, entertainment, and business all distract us or prevent us from accomplishing anything. McKay takes all the shots he wants at Trump and the MAGA movement. He complains about celebrities, social media, and news as entertainment. He doesn’t really offer any ideas about how to make things better (unless saying “Can’t people just not be idiots?” counts). Then, if you call him on it: “The movie is a satire. I’m just a dumb filmmaker making dick jokes. It’s our politicians and leaders who need to fix this.” Either take a stand or say that nothing matters. Not both.

 

It doesn’t help that the movie isn’t very good either. For a satire, it’s pretty light on actual jokes. I never really understood the rules of this world. Who are the mindless public and who are the people worth saving? Or is McKay’s outlook truly so nihilistic that no one is worth saving? The dinner table scene at the end makes me think otherwise. It’s not like the film is walking this perilous tightrope that every filmmaker falls on: some noble but impossible task. People like Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong have been making the same kind of social satire with despicable characters for over a decade and still manage to be funny and human. Just look at how The Death of Stalin is both incredibly funny while still having very tragic and human moments. Does Adam McKay even like making these movies? It feels like he hates making them and only does it because if he doesn’t, no one else will educate the mindless majority.

 

Attempting to separate the performances from the writing, I do like what a lot of the actors were doing in this. Leonardo DiCaprio as a low status character is a lot of fun. Between this and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, I’m really enjoying his trend of seeing how pathetic he can make himself. Jennifer Lawrence would’ve been great as a straight man commenting on the absurdity had the movie given her more. Stuff like her obsession with the general charging her for free snacks or annoyance over how the FBI captured her on her morning run are fun gags that she plays well. This movie could’ve benefited so much by focusing more on quirks than caricature. Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep play different kinds of awful women with a lot of verve. Mark Rylance makes some real choices as an anti-social Steve Jobs. It’s a shame that he played the same character better in Ready Player One. I do wish McKay would stop including pop stars in his movies. Ariana Grande is a very funny performer yet all she does here is act vapid and sing a boring song. I don’t think he realized what kind of weapon he had on set. Timothy Chalamet almost made his disaffected youth character work. It’s frustrating because if these people were given an actual clever comedy to be in, they would’ve been awesome.

 

Let’s see. That’s about a 700-word rant. That long enough. This movie sucks. Eventually Adam McKay will lose his disdain for his audience and characters and make something genuinely great, right? He keeps having the right pieces and assembling them the wrong way.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Bruised

Premise: Halle Berry is a former MMA fighter poised for a comeback.

 

This movie is weird. Not in any cinematic sense. It’s pretty normal in terms of story, acting, and direction. It’s only notable in that sense Halle Berry directed it (her feature film debut). It’s weird because of Halle Berry in the lead role. First of all, she’s not the first person to come to mind as an MMA fighter. I mean, she is tough. She’s been Storm, Catwoman, and a Bond Girl. She’s not a close-fisted punching type though. Secondly, she was 53 when she filmed this. I did a quick Google search and the oldest female UFC fighter* is 43 years old. Berry has a 6-year-old kid in this. It was shortly after she gave him up that her character had a panic attack in her big break fight (which I believe was for UFC), putting her at roughly 47. That’s all implausibly old. However, Halle Berry is so well-preserved that you could tell me she’s playing virtually any age. It sort of breaks my brain though. You cast Halle Berry because of how young she looks yet she’s playing a washed up fighter. So it’s like you are casting a 53-year-old to play a 33-year-old passing for a 43-year-old. I know I get too fixated on ages in movies sometimes, but this one really shook me.

 

*I know UFC and MMA aren’t exactly the same, but it’s a decent analog.

 

This movie is OK. It stacked a few too many storylines. She’s an alcoholic with an abusive boyfriend and a long-lost son returning while she’s making her comeback as an MMA fighter. She’s battling panic attacks, has a fractured relationship with her mother, was abused as a child, and has a relationship with her female trainer. It was so much that it made the movie feel longer. I know my beloved Warrior is even longer than this, but that movie is organized to feel shorter. First half is setup. Second half is fights. With Bruised though, I lost track of which story was even supposed to mean the most.

 

This is the best Berry has been in a while. It’s a good role to remind other filmmakers that she’s still around. The main thing I can say about her direction is that it felt pretty invisible. Had I not known it was her directing, I never would’ve thought about it. I would’ve preferred the 1h45m version of this with half the trauma. Any two complications would’ve been plenty for a movie. Having 6-7 overwhelmed.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Harder They Fall

Premise: The Quick and The Dead, but black.

 

This is a tricky film to talk about and praise. Calling is a black Western feels reductive, yet that’s kind of the point. Nearly everything about this movie is “just another fun Western”. It’s full of gunslingers, shootouts, cops, and criminals. It could’ve come out in nearly any decade. The characters and themes are timeless. This is a Western movie for people who like entertaining Westerns. It’s executed very well. The thing that is special about it is that the cast is almost all black. It’s a loaded cast with Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, Lakeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Deon Cole, Damon Wayans Jr, and others. Basically, anytime in the last 5 years that you saw a black actor in a movie or show who you thought should really be in more things, they show up in this movie.

 

I’ve talked before about how I’m loving this trend of inaccurate casting for historical movies and shows. I think we all logically know that a royal court in Europe in the 1600s was just a bunch of white people. But, if you decide to just cast a bunch of good actors who happen to be diverse, is anyone really going to care? Recent years have proven the answer is “No”. If pure historical accuracy isn’t the point of the project, then accurate historical casting doesn’t matter either. Besides, remember those decades of epics where no one had a problem with Charlton Heston as a Jewish Egyptian? The Harder They Fall is a movie-star movie and they cast movie stars to drip with charisma all over it. And it works. Of course, there’s some mention of the racial disparity at the time, but it’s not the point of the movie. It’s a revisionist Western and a damn entertaining one. If you’ve ever liked a Western, you’ll like this. It’s that simple.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: tick, tick…Boom!

Premise: A theater composer recounts his personal and career pressures as he nears his 30^th birthday.

 

I’m seeing three avenues to attack a discussion about this movie. There’s the John Larson of it all, Lin-Manuel Miranda as a director, or Andrew Garfield making good. I’m not a big musical theater person. I’ve never even listened to the entire RENT soundtrack. I know of its significance and recognize a few songs, but I could not go into tick, tick…Boom! (TTB from now on) from that perspective. I tend to conflate John Larson and Howard Ashman’s stories too.

 

What I can definitely say though is that TTB is a story for the Broadway obsessives. I saw one person tweet that it’s Ready Player One for Broadway, and it’s hard to argue with that. A lot of familiar faces show up for small and large parts. There’s a diner scene in particular that’s just plain nuts. Everything about how the songs are written and composed and the creative process are catnip to a certain audience. I wonder how this movie will end up faring with awards bodies, because it’s the kind of movie where the fans are probably louder than the general support. To me, it feels like a Lead Actor nomination, Original song, and maybe a technical award nomination or two. But it sounds like some are expecting a 10-nomination juggernaut. I’d be happy if that happened, but I worry.

 

It is definitely Andrew Garfield’s movie. It’s hard to see how he doesn’t get an Oscar nomination from it. He’s all over the movie, both narrating and performing it. He sings. He dances. He emotes. Whether the entry point was Boy A, The Social Network, or Hacksaw Ridge, many have been waiting for the role that fully maximized Garfield’s talents, and this appears to be it. Alexandra Shipp is definitely the next most prominent person as Larson’s put-upon girlfriend. She’s awesome in a very supporting role. From an awards perspective, I’m curious to see what happens with Vanessa Hudgens. She is excellent in this. She’s clearly a John Larson fangirl for how often she shows up in projects relating to him. Her role in this is weird. She’s part of the stage show that forms the spine of the story. She’s a limited character in the “real life” parts but integral to the stage parts, often standing in for Shipp’s character. I sometimes forget that she can really sing and she gets some great number in this. She’s maybe too much of a chorus player to really get any supporting actress attention, especially with Shipp there in an easier to define role. Some Hudgens attention would be warranted though.

 

Lin-Manuel Miranda directed this. It’s his feature directorial debut. He is in this even less than In the Heights but it’s easy to feel his presence throughout. The easiest connection is that John Larson’s race against turning 30 feels a lot like Hamilton’s running out of time. It’s funny how Miranda, a guy who debuted on Broadway when he was 28 with a play he wrote, is so obsessed with not accomplishing anything or enough. TTB is based on an off-Broadway show Larson started performing in 1990, so it’s fair to assume it inspired the idea in Hamilton rather than Hamilton attracting Miranda to this movie idea.

 

I really liked TTB, even as I was aware that I wasn’t the audience getting the most out of it. Garfield is really spectacular in it. Miranda acquits himself well as a director. He doesn’t bite off too much or inject himself into it in a distracting way. I’ll be curious to see what/if he directs next. I’d like to see what he does with something he doesn’t have such a personal connection to, although I do think that helped this a lot.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Trust

Premise: A husband and wife don’t trust each other and decide to test it.

 

I have no good reason for watching this. My thought process really went no further than “I’m not looking for anything challenging right now, I already have Hulu pulled up, and Victoria Justice is pretty.” Sure, there’s a little more to it than that, but not much. It’s a 2021 movie, and this time of year, I’m trying to sneak in as many of those as I can, giving Trust the tie-breaker vote over similar movies. I remain genuinely curious about Victoria Justice. These Disney Channel and Nickelodeon stars who stay in the business tend to be stealthily good performers. Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez may have gone onto be pop stars, but whenever they do show up to host SNL and be in a series they remind us that they are old pros at this. So many can fall back on a network sitcom if all else fails. I’m still figuring out who Victoria Justice is though. She’s had a music career. She’s done the teen movies. Nothing has stuck yet. I wonder what the next move is. She’s 28, so a lot of options are still open. She can become a Stream Queen. Afterlife of the Party did pretty well on Netflix this year. If she’s willing to move to ensembles, I’m sure a laugh track sitcom would welcome her. She’s the perfect age for a CW show too (She still has a good 5 years of passing for a college student if necessary). I wonder when she’ll get the Sundance bug. I don’t know. She remains a weird blank slate to me.

 

I just hope she doesn’t stick with movies like Trust. Aspects of the movie are intriguing. There’s a little Last Night or Closer in this in the right light. I like the time hopping and reveals over time. The shifting trust of the two leads is fun. I just don’t ever think the movie makes its case. The husband cheats pretty early on. At absolute best, he and his wife are even in how wrong they are. The fact that he feels neglected by his wife is never enough to sway sympathy to his side.

 

There needs to be a term for movies that spend a lot of time convincing the audience that the men are more attractive and the women are less attractive. It’s sort of “male gaze” adjacent. Victoria Justice spends most of the movie like she’s unaware how attractive she is: worried that her husband would cheat on her and taken aback by how much her artist client, Lucien Laviscount, is attracted to her. I laughed at the scene when Justice hires Katherine McNamara and McNamara has to assure her that she’ll dress nicer and look prettier when she tries to seduce her husband. I’m sorry, no real person is looking at McNamara at any point on screen in this movie and saying, “I don’t know. She seems kind of frumpy wearing pants like that”. On the other hand, the movie works hard to tell me that Matthew Daddario and Lucien Laviscount drop panties on sight. I’m not the best judge, I suppose, both neither strike me as hunky. They are good looking men, but I don’t see why Justice would assume every woman is throwing herself at him. A character actually calls Laviscount the sexiest man alive which…really? I guess he’s got the artist thing going for him and he’s a bad boy. Seems forced to me.

 

The vague ending is expected but works well enough. I got the movie I thought I would, so it’s hard to complain. Nothing popped in the movie. When watching a movie like this, the hope is always that there will be one thing that pops. Like 50 Shades of Grey. Very mediocre movie, but I definitely came away from it thinking Dakota Johnson could be great in a better movie. Nothing pops in Trust. Justice and Daddario don’t raise the material. There are no supporting characters making the most of their screen time. The screenplay has clever ideas but doesn’t explore any of them enough. This is a complete write-off as a film experience.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Silent Night

Premise: A family celebrates one last Christmas before a gas comes and kills all of humanity.

 

It’s time for another round of everyone’s favorite game: Indie Movie or COVID Production.

Silent Night was released in 2021. It has a cast a little over a dozen people but hardly has any scenes with someone outside that core cast. And it almost entirely takes place in an isolated farm estate. This could be for precautionary isolation or simply because it’s cheaper to shoot a movie with few extras and a single set. There are several familiar faces; namely Kiera Knightley. That doesn’t tell us much. It turns out, this was barely a pre-COVID production. According to Wikipedia, filming was set to begin on 2/17/20 and I don’t see anything to contradict it. So, even though this looks like a thrifty COVID project, it’s just a thrifty indie movie.

 

I do enjoy a swaperoo movie like this. It starts as a family Christmas dramedy then turns into a tragic SciFi movie as you realize they are gathered for one last party before the end of the world. You see, there’s a mysterious gas that’s covering the world and kills everyone who comes in contact with it. It’s set to reach England that night. The government basically sent everyone poison pills to take before the gas gets them, so they are having one last hurrah before taking the pills.

 

It’s a fun idea. I enjoyed how it slowly reveals the party’s purpose. I don’t really buy all the character decisions though. Oddly, Knightley was already in an end of the world movie (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) that I think does a better job exploring the mindsets of people about to die. The people in Silent Night all seem to hate each other. If the world’s about to end, I’d expect more nihilism. I really don’t understand why Lily-Rose Depp and Sope Dirisu would show up. They must have people they’d rather be with. And there’s no sense of people discussing issues earlier. Except for Depp and the one boy questioning the logic of taking the pill, everyone is completely resigned to giving up. Especially since COVID, we’ve seen how many people distrust government warnings. It was too hard for me to be in the moment with this movie to appreciate any of the performances. Like, the darkly comic bit with Matthew Goode getting the Cokes at the end should’ve been a lot more gutting, but I had to much trouble getting past all my questions.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Android/Mother

Premise: Judgment Day (a la Terminator) with a pregnant mother.

 

Let’s talk about Chloe Grace Moretz for a minute. For a while, she was our preeminent “kid who works well with adults” (alternatively “kid who swears”). You throw her into something with adult co-stars and she makes a meal out of it. She’s kicked ass in Kick Ass. She gave comic sagely advice in (500) Days of Summer. She matched wits with Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock. It was clear that she was meant to be on camera, but it wasn’t obvious what she would evolve into as an adult. Neighbors 2: Sorority Row indicated that her same swearing shtick didn’t work as well as a she got older. She’d need to hone her comedy skills if she was going to continue in that direction. She didn’t quite fit in the YA drama mold (If I Stay, Brain on Fire). She’s taken the indie route often enough (Clouds of Sils Maria, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Laggies) that I could see her moving more toward that in the coming years. There are two places where she really pops now though. The first is horror. She’s been doing this for a while (Let Me In, 2010) and has remained active in the genre (Carrie, 2013, Suspiria, 2018, Greta, 2018. Not to mention horror-adjacent comedies like Dark Shadows and The Addams Family). What made her work as a child actor was her ability to take absurd ideas seriously. That works for “swearing kid” roles (she would say something like an adult and make it seem like she knew what she was saying) and it works for horror (since everything in horror is something weird made scary by seeming real).

 

The second place she pops is a movie like Android/Mother. Basically, the pulpy Sci-Fi movie. In 2016, she made The Fifth Wave. At the time, it looked like her attempt at her Hunger Games. There was a wave of these YA dystopias or supernatural romances (The Host, Divergent, Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments, etc.). That movie mostly failed, but it seems to have moved her into a new direction. In the last two years now, she’s made both Shadow in the Cloud and Mother/Android. Both are dramas with a Sci-fi twist in which she plays a young mother. Shadow in the Cloud is much pulpier and stylized. Mother/Android is more directly Sci-Fi and dramatic. They are very similar though. Like why she works in horror, Moretz works in these because of how seriously she takes the silliest parts of them. And in both cases, the result is a decently fun movie. Shadow in the Cloud is a little better just for how nuts it gets, but they each have their merit.

 

So, I’m liking the current blueprint for Moretz’s career. Work in the genre space (horror, Sci-Fi) long enough to get out of the kid actor space (she’s still only 24!). Look for the occasional Sundance movie to keep her familiar with the arty types. Maybe be in a family film often enough for good paychecks and easy familiarity. By the time she’s 30, she’s got enough clout, experience, and familiarity with audiences to do just about anything. At least, that’s my optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that none of the big filmmakers are casting her for anything so she’s taking whatever lead roles she can get, hoping that eventually something breaks out or she stumbles into a workable identity as a grown-up performer. Either way, I remain interested.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Guilty

Premise: Jake Gyllenhaal is a 911 dispatcher who gets too involved in a specific call.

 

I'm a sucker for this kind of movie. All of it takes place at the 911 call center from Jake Gyllenhaal’s perspective. Mostly, it's watching him talk to people on the phone. That kind of claustrophobic thriller almost always works for me: Locke, Buried, Phone Booth. If the story and characters are interesting enough, I'm happy to sign on. Even without that gimmick, I like movies that expand then contract the narrative around a complicated situation (think, Eye in the Sky). And Jake Gyllenhaal is on my shortlist of favorite actors. He's not infallible, but when he's on (Nightcrawler), he's great.

 

I didn't connect with this movie as much as I thought I would though. It felt more tense than busy, and the more I learned about Gyllenhaal's character actually made him harder to relate to. The mechanics of the emergency with the mother who he thinks is in danger are great. I love following the series of calls he makes trying to locate the car and learn more. It makes me appreciate the people doing that job more.

 

The twist is gutting. However, I can't shake the feeling that they aren't playing fair with it. It's probably just me being salty for being tricked. I think some of it ties to not knowing what Gyllenhaal is in trouble for. As we find out, his guilt over killing a young man while on the job drove his decision to continue so hard with this call. It's his chance for redemption in his mind. I think understanding his motivations more would help the tension. Because that's the other problem I had with the movie. It felt more busy than tense. The reason why something like Locke works so well is because it feels like Tom Hardy is trying to keep several plates spinning at the same time. All have priority and urgency in their own way. In The Guilty, only one thing is actually urgent. The calls from reporters are annoying. His attempts to speak to his daughter are his attempt to escape, not an added complication. With the mother he is trying to help, the complications are because he's trying to break protocol, not because he's actually doing much to help. The fact that that falls apart fundamentally changes the kind of movie I thought I was watching. Instead of being "competency porn"*, it's about a guy who is effective but bad at this job. He's bad at his last job. He's bad at his family life. He's kind of a dick to people. It made me less engaged the more I learned. It's a slow-moving train wreck story, but it deprived us of the buildup to the crash. The aftermath of a slow-moving train wreck may be bad, but seeing it happen and knowing you can't stop it is was makes it so tense. Just imagine if we knew early on that he's feeling guilty over shooting the young man. What if there were more warning signs that something's not right with the mother? How tense would it be if there was a pause every couple minutes for us to decide whether he was pushing so hard because of guilt or because it's the right thing to do?

 

*Another term I've heard for movie about people doing their damn jobs well.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend