1/16/2024 0 Comments Serenity film 2019The arrival of Baker’s femme fatale ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway, blonde) reshapes what could be fairly deemed “The Old-But-Still-Got-It Man and the Sea” as a Sunshine State noir at maximum humidity. Maybe it’s all the cryptic non sequiturs spoken by the townspeople, but something’s definitely amiss. He whiles away his days taking visitors out on fishing expeditions, making extra scratch in his side-hustle as a gigolo – McConaughey’s bare buttocks command more screen time than some of the human supporting actors – and single-mindedly pursuing a tuna he’s named “Justice” for symbolic purposes. Where he comes from seems to be a mystery even to him, the haunted look in his eyes our only hint at an unspoken dark past. The minuscule tax-lax African island doubles for Plymouth, an isolated seaside community tucked away in the Florida Keys where the gruff Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey, his Oscar win now a distant memory) has taken up residence. The January movie is what happens when someone with a lot of vision and a minimum of self-awareness stops hearing the word “no,” and in this particular case, Knight lets his absolute assurance in his misguided mission run away with him all the way to Mauritius. Evidently convinced of his own brilliance, Knight wielded enough industry cachet to steamroll the people generally tasked with keeping ideas like Serenity in the brains of their makers. Serenity was written, directed, and produced by Steven Knight, who’s proven himself competent in all three disciplines as a one-time scribe for David Cronenberg, the helmer of 2014’s solid Locke, and the creator of such BBC favorites as Peaky Blinders and Taboo. The January movie stands out not for its failings, but for the confidence and ingenuity with which it fails. This merely describes a symptom, however, and not the condition itself. (There are also traces of January in late August, after summer movie season has taken its dying breaths.) Serenity was originally slated for an awards-courting release date back in September, then nudged ahead one month for reasons inscrutable to those outside distribution outfit Aviron Pictures, and finally moved once more to its rightful resting place in late January. The typical January movie has been orphaned by a studio with little faith in its earning potential, banished to the post-holiday moviegoing lull, where riskier strains of badness may freely flourish without attracting too much public attention.
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