Flipper
02-05-23, 09:20 PM
This won't be a thorough review, but just some impressionistic observations. I never heard of this movie until a few days ago. I was catching up on all my Kevin Bacon movies that I had not yet seen, and tried Death Sentence which wasn't the greatest, and was really only hanging on by a thread in Kevin Bacon's performance. However something about the actor who played the bad guy interested me, so I looked him up -- Garrett Hedlund -- and checked out his movies. Then I saw Mojave which coincidentally was directed by the same director. So I thought what the hell I'll try it. And it turned out to be quite a good film.
It did have some slow spots that kind of dragged a bit, but overall quite entertaining. One quality it had that I dearly appreciate and wish more filmmakers would employ: it unfolded interesting details by just showing them without explaining them. So the protagonist played by Garrett Hedlund during the first 20 minutes seems to be a loser who's out in the desert trying to clear his head or something -- it's unclear what's going on -- and then he meets a mysterious figure out there who seems nefarious but he can't quite tell. So the director doesn't tell you even when Garrett comes back into civilization again, that in fact he's a famous artist/celebrity of some kind either in movies or in music it remains unclear, but he's got an entourage and a beautiful mansion in Beverly Hills and of course girlfriends and drugs up the wazoo, etc. But none of this is explained or belabored; it's just presented unremarkably, which I like.
Even though Garrett Hedlund is a pretty good actor, this role really should have gone to Johnny Depp. He would have been perfect, and it would have been his best role ever (which I frankly don't think he's ever had). As for the bad guy who begins to stalk him by following him from the desert into Beverly Hills, even though the actor Oscar Isaac is pretty good at conveying an unassumingly slimy quality with some ethereal evil between the lines, I still think someone else would have been better -- actor Christian Camargo.
It did have some slow spots that kind of dragged a bit, but overall quite entertaining. One quality it had that I dearly appreciate and wish more filmmakers would employ: it unfolded interesting details by just showing them without explaining them. So the protagonist played by Garrett Hedlund during the first 20 minutes seems to be a loser who's out in the desert trying to clear his head or something -- it's unclear what's going on -- and then he meets a mysterious figure out there who seems nefarious but he can't quite tell. So the director doesn't tell you even when Garrett comes back into civilization again, that in fact he's a famous artist/celebrity of some kind either in movies or in music it remains unclear, but he's got an entourage and a beautiful mansion in Beverly Hills and of course girlfriends and drugs up the wazoo, etc. But none of this is explained or belabored; it's just presented unremarkably, which I like.
Even though Garrett Hedlund is a pretty good actor, this role really should have gone to Johnny Depp. He would have been perfect, and it would have been his best role ever (which I frankly don't think he's ever had). As for the bad guy who begins to stalk him by following him from the desert into Beverly Hills, even though the actor Oscar Isaac is pretty good at conveying an unassumingly slimy quality with some ethereal evil between the lines, I still think someone else would have been better -- actor Christian Camargo.