Since he first entered and entered our moviegoing lives in the late 1980s, Hugh Grant has been charming, engaging, wonderfully funny and sometimes menacing. He managed to do all four while playing himself up while portraying a cocky character opposite a teddy bear in 2017.‘s Paddington 2, arguably the best film of the last decade. (True or not, it’s a fun debate.) What he can’t be accused of being is dull, even on the inside. easy movies.
Well, that’s over.
|
HERETIC ★1/2 (1.5/4 stars) |
Like a sadistic intruder who threatens Mormon missionaries in a new horror film traitor, Grant gives the least joyous performance of his fifteen-year career. Explaining everything from world religions to Radiohead‘s “Creep” while donning clerk store wireframes and a shiny jacket,‘less Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees than the guy in the middle seat of a winning Southwest flight.‘don’t stop talking while you‘I’m trying to learn.
Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods—filmmakers from Davenport, Iowa (they have movie theater there) who wrote the first text of 2018‘s A Quiet Place—the film is structured like a Socratic seminar, as Grant tries to analyze the girls‘ belief system as a precursor to their physical destruction. But the speech comes across as a Bond villain’s monologue as written by a brilliant Facebook acquaintance.
Grant‘Mr. Reed also asks the young women so many questions—some of them inappropriate, some of them off-putting—that he starts to sound like Peter Graves.‘ a pilot talking to a boy in the cockpit in 1980‘s Airplane! (One gem: “Have you ever played a game of Parker Brothers Monopoly?”) The actor does not get the point after Mr. Reed—none to be found—and is forced to rely on playing his former self, his greatest asset. effect on other films.
Sophie Tucker (Yellowjackets) plays the more street-smart of the two; Chloe East, naive and very dedicated (she was great as the same love interest in Steven Spielberg.‘s The Fabelmans). Both are slightly better than Grant, especially in the early scenes. But when the film strays from the narrative—even within the confines of a horror movie—they (and we) fail to hold on.
A rebel it draws whatever brilliance it has from its artifacts. Phillip Messina, production designer for hunger Games movies, it’s a cottage core torture house straight out of our childhood nightmares. Low-light camerawork by Chung-hoon Chung (both lensed by Park Chan-wook‘s Old boy and Andy Muschietti‘s It, among many others) is impressively framed and lit, especially when the action moves—as it inevitably does in movies like this—in the basement.
At that time, however, there is only a small amount the camera can capture. The back-and-forth that created the tension in the beginning boils down to fostering an unbelievable character in Grant.‘s and discovering the truth of the Scooby-Doo Gang on the part of his young captives.
Beck and Woods seem to be making a point about how atheists can be as fanatical and intolerant as devotees. True enough, but taken to these extremes, their argument is like Hannibal Lecter eating people‘ livers to make the point that vegetarians are real hypocrites.
A rebel‘The fatal flaw is its pride. The film seems to have forgotten that when it plays cat and mouse games, the cat is, at least, meant to be entertained. Grant is not here and least of all, not us.
