Wounds

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🎙️ EPISODE 256: 04.08.20 What a fucking mess! This film is a total disaster that wants to be a dozen things at once and fails at being anything of them. It would be comically bad save for Armie Hammer’s performance (and I can still say that despite....umm, yeah 1); I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor try harder to make lemonade out of a lemon like this script. Unlike Dakota Johnson, who – speaking of phones! we'll get to that – is truly phoning it in (albeit in a surprisingly small onscreen role, given that she’s billed as the co-star and is playing the girlfriend, but honestly this is the least of this film’s problems). Where to even begin?

First off, it starts with a Conrad quote from the literary masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. And that says a lot about Wounds’ biggest, most glaring flaw: it wants so badly to have MEANING. This technology! These phones! Look what it’s doing to the youth, to SOCIETY, man? You could have made a movie about an evil cursed cellphone that seeks to awaken alien spirits (?) – which this movie is also about, believe it or not – and not tried to do overt social commentary. That movie might have also been terrible, but hey… options?

During one of the endless streams of bad dialogue, one character calls another character “a mock person.” And that stuck with me, because this is a mock movie. It doesn't know what it wants to be. Hard horror. Satirical critique. Interpersonal relationship drama. But, in addition to Hammer giving it his all, the film looks like a film. It’s visually competent and there are actually some nice shots. But, alas, this is a mock movie. It takes elements that would otherwise be a major or THE major crux on their own (the college kids and the cellphone stuff, the Afghanistan war, Dakota Johnson being sucked into a laptop void, cockroaches! etc etc etc) and lets them all rot. No thread is either elaborated on OR completed. Your theory on what any of this means is correct. Congratulations!

You'll likely stick around for the "catch." Of course you will, even if you know it's gonna be incredibly underwhelming. Or in this case: absent. Everything is unearned and half-baked. And by the end of it, when the cockroaches are literally crawling on the camera lens, you'll be left wishing they'd been there the entire time to shield you from having watched this nonsense.

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FOOTNOTES:

1. It's actually too bad this wasn't his final film before being cancelled (that would have been hilarious), but then again he's probably too rich to be HARD canceled FOR LIFE. Only time will tell. Aren't movies fun? [BACK]

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 255 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 257 ⫸

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