Those Who Wish Me Dead - watching this feels like you’re dying, so they have a point. Directed by Taylor Sheridan - and I swear, I could spot his rotten directing from the get-go. In watching new films, I often try to block out who the director is, so I don’t prejudice myself. That’s what happened here. Once I saw who directed it, I thought “that figures” - being apparently the only person on this board who detested “Wind River” (I started a thread here), and all the flaws of that piece of garbage were amplified here.
SPOILER ALERT!!
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I watched it out of grim fascination - a cousin to “hate watching” - on account of Angelina Jolie... what a train wreck. I mean, first and foremost she was insanely miscast. Set aside that nobody looking like that would ever come within a mile of being a firefighter in a podunk town. But she looks in a very specific way... I don’t know if she had any work done on her face recently, but she has that fragile look to her face as if everything is hanging by a thread and one broad smile would result in a complete unraveling of her head, so you’d need to pick up the pieces off the floor. What she looks most like is that predatory species of Los Angeles post divorce, last call female on the make who spends her time in the gym not really exercising but trying to land another husband before her looks are beyond salvage. Another way of saying that AJ needs to have a good thing about what roles she can play convincingly, because a firefighter who needs to carry 100 pounds of gear and jump out of airplanes is not a look she can pull off with anyone who is not comatose. Everybody ages and it is what it is, but you need to figure out how you’re going to transition in your acting career to keep some integrity to your work.
The plot revolves around the most basic and lazy of premises, but that’s not the problem, and the mcguffin is thorougly ignorable. The problem is the exact same lack of imagination that plagued Wind River - the director is too dumb or too lazy to come up with basic plausibility in action sequences so that we are not thrown out of the movie by how stupid it all is, and so it doesn’t telegraph what’s going to happen miles ahead. Example: in the final confrontation the remaining bad guy behaves so stupidly it defies all belief - and at the same time you know exactly why he does that, so that the moronic actions can take place - AJ has just assaulted him with a firefighter’s axe, and when he has her down for the count, he decides the best thing to do is to get up, turn his back to her so that he can be attacked by her from behind - and of course we know he’s not going to manage to kill the kid (because it’s not NC-17), so the only thing that can happen that’ll also make AJ the hero is exactly what happens. It’s so predictable, so disheartening, that you watch it with zero excitement, zero tension, zero anticipation, basically ZERO ENGAGEMENT. You merely feel offended by how lazy the director is in not coming up with anything more clever or innovative, and how insultingly low opinion he must hold of the audience to try to pass off this tripe.
And this low opinion of the audience is there from the first moments. How many times do we need to see and be reminded that AJ’s character feels guilt stemming from a previous encounter with the fire and how she needs to redeem herself? It comes up and comes up and comes up and comes up a million times and it’s boring as f*ck.
Given that super basic premise, the director does absolutely nothing with it that’s even one milimeter outside of the most played out cliches. Everything else also screams hack - from the camera work, shot composition, editing to the wretched music. Taylor Sheridan is the definition of talentless hack - you are guaranteed to always be served up a cliche when watching any of his awful movies. Thoroughly detestable - 2 stars out of 10, and only because he took the lens cap off when filming, though on second thought, he’d have been better off leaving it on.
SPOILER ALERT!!
—————————————————————-
I watched it out of grim fascination - a cousin to “hate watching” - on account of Angelina Jolie... what a train wreck. I mean, first and foremost she was insanely miscast. Set aside that nobody looking like that would ever come within a mile of being a firefighter in a podunk town. But she looks in a very specific way... I don’t know if she had any work done on her face recently, but she has that fragile look to her face as if everything is hanging by a thread and one broad smile would result in a complete unraveling of her head, so you’d need to pick up the pieces off the floor. What she looks most like is that predatory species of Los Angeles post divorce, last call female on the make who spends her time in the gym not really exercising but trying to land another husband before her looks are beyond salvage. Another way of saying that AJ needs to have a good thing about what roles she can play convincingly, because a firefighter who needs to carry 100 pounds of gear and jump out of airplanes is not a look she can pull off with anyone who is not comatose. Everybody ages and it is what it is, but you need to figure out how you’re going to transition in your acting career to keep some integrity to your work.
The plot revolves around the most basic and lazy of premises, but that’s not the problem, and the mcguffin is thorougly ignorable. The problem is the exact same lack of imagination that plagued Wind River - the director is too dumb or too lazy to come up with basic plausibility in action sequences so that we are not thrown out of the movie by how stupid it all is, and so it doesn’t telegraph what’s going to happen miles ahead. Example: in the final confrontation the remaining bad guy behaves so stupidly it defies all belief - and at the same time you know exactly why he does that, so that the moronic actions can take place - AJ has just assaulted him with a firefighter’s axe, and when he has her down for the count, he decides the best thing to do is to get up, turn his back to her so that he can be attacked by her from behind - and of course we know he’s not going to manage to kill the kid (because it’s not NC-17), so the only thing that can happen that’ll also make AJ the hero is exactly what happens. It’s so predictable, so disheartening, that you watch it with zero excitement, zero tension, zero anticipation, basically ZERO ENGAGEMENT. You merely feel offended by how lazy the director is in not coming up with anything more clever or innovative, and how insultingly low opinion he must hold of the audience to try to pass off this tripe.
And this low opinion of the audience is there from the first moments. How many times do we need to see and be reminded that AJ’s character feels guilt stemming from a previous encounter with the fire and how she needs to redeem herself? It comes up and comes up and comes up and comes up a million times and it’s boring as f*ck.
Given that super basic premise, the director does absolutely nothing with it that’s even one milimeter outside of the most played out cliches. Everything else also screams hack - from the camera work, shot composition, editing to the wretched music. Taylor Sheridan is the definition of talentless hack - you are guaranteed to always be served up a cliche when watching any of his awful movies. Thoroughly detestable - 2 stars out of 10, and only because he took the lens cap off when filming, though on second thought, he’d have been better off leaving it on.
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