A noirish thriller, starring two Oscar winners, set in paradise involving an ex husband tasked with murdering his ex-wife’s current, abusive, husband… on paper has potential. Once Serenity commences and writer-director Steven Knight (Locke) reveals his pedantic script, painful plot turns and utterly atrocious dramatic twist, this late January release cannot conclude soon enough.
There is a fun subgenre of film that finds those “so bad it’s good” movies. Sadly, Serenity is not one of those.
McConaughey portrays Baker Dill, a fishing boat captain who is struggling financially. He’s doing his best to make ends meet—particularly to support his first mate Duke (an utterly wasted Djimon Hounsou). Taking drunken tourists and wanna-be fishermen and women out on the blue waters and leading them to where the sharks and prize fish reside has produced a Moby Dick like side-effect. See, there is a giant fish of some variety that appears to almost be taunting Baker. He will go to the ends of the earth to find and hook this monster of a sea creature. As we learn soon after the film begins, it has been known to cost him his fee. He gets distracted by the sea beast and paying customers don’t appreciate his taking over their excursion to accomplish his Captain Ahab obsession.
Hathaway is Karen Zariakas, a woman soaking in extraordinary wealth and is walking-talking proof that money does not buy happiness. In fact, it has brought her nothing but hell as her violently and psychologically abusive husband Frank (Jason Clarke) makes her and her son’s existence one littered with constant taunts and ever-present fear. What’s a girl to do? How about head to a tropical island and seek out your ex-husband and convince him that their son is in eminent danger so he must take her Frank and dump him overboard as fish food for the sharks.
This is a noir premise that has been done to death (pun intended) and therefore it already has a few strikes against it. Then, it just gets worse from there as it bombards its audience with dialogue so painful that a giant shark bite would seem like a relief to those witnessing this travesty. All involve try their best to elevate the material, but there is only so much an actor or actress can do when your director also penned your script. Also, and this is what went through my head witnessing this celluloid train wreck, these Oscar winning superstars read this script as it was and signed up for it without any kind of coercion!
Perhaps they felt that once it was edited together, given a haunting score and put into perspective of it arriving during the middle of the #MeToo movement that it might carry some sort of emotional and societal weight? No, not even close and that is because Knight’s script never establishes Karen as that put-upon woman, save for one scene when her hubby arrives at their hotel a day earlier than expected and performs an inspection… let’s just say it’s uncomfortable.
It’s hard when the viewer is not emotionally invested in the souls on the screen who are in the midst of the peril, but actively is scanning the room for the door as a way to get out of this mess and resume some sort of evening worthy of us waking at the beginning of the day! That’s the real tragedy here is that inside what Serenity delivers is a film that could have made quite a statement about women in abusive relationships and how ex-husbands might consider doing something that could put them in jail for the rest of their lives due to the horrific landscape one’s ex and one’s child endures daily. Nope, not in this flick. It’s just so painfully put together, piled with dreadful dialogue and features plot twists and turns that not only do not make sense, but even if they did—we would not care.
McConaughey, if you recall, had a resurgence a few years back (called a McConaissance) that concluded with him winning an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. Prior to that upswing in his career, he made a lot of films that were just incredibly bad, and Serenity reminds me of quite a few of those. We’ve seen him play this character before, kind of like a hybrid between his Fool’s Gold and Sahara roles with a dash of Reign of Fire in there for good measure. Let’s just hope that this was a bump in the road project for the actor because he has such immense talent. For example, that The Beach Bum trailer looks promising for his March release.
Meanwhile, Hathaway attempts to give her Karen a femme fatale feel to it. Which is completely the wrong direction. It comes off as a failed Jessica Rabbit meets someone playing sexy for laughs on SNL. Visually, Hathaway emits flailing instead of fatale. This is not that kind of character. Sure, she uses her wiles to get Baker to do her bidding. But, due to his emotional connection to the situation (heck, he and she used to be a family with their boy!), that seems like the sensical notes she would be hitting. She does that too, because if nothing else, Serenity utilizes a kitchen sink methodology to its storytelling. Knight throws everything at the screen, hoping that something will stick. It doesn’t. Like, none of it.
It’s not even visually pleasing. This is a tropical island we’re talking about that never once gives us the impression that it is someplace worth visiting. It’s not that these people are so profane that the landscape lacks luster. No, it’s just how Knight and his DP shot this film. It never possesses that tropical thunder (to borrow from a McConaughey film that works) that culls an audience’s desire to get swept away to paradise. It also never goes visually dark, even though it is clearly trying to be a film that sits in the noir corner of the movie room. It’s just flat viscerally and that too is a sorry spoke in a failed wheel that is this picture.
Knight can do great stuff. His work on Locke is the stuff of legend. Knight’s screenplays often lend themselves to noir crime power, such as The Girl in the Spider’s Web and Pawn Sacrifice. The latter, he made chess seem thrilling! The man can work magic, it’s just he swung for the fences on Serenity and struck out with the bases loaded full of talent. Speaking of actors with supreme gifts, what is Diane Lane doing in this movie? She’s a sometimes sugar momma for Baker and the duo have a few sex scenes that are not just eye-rolling, they are painful for the eyes and ears. Just one more example of how Serenity is already our front-runner for the 2020 Razzies.
Grade: D-