The Last Thing He Wanted (2020) Netflix/Drama RT: 115 minutes Rated R (language, some violence, disturbing images, brief nudity) Director: Dee Rees Screenplay: Marco Villalobos and Dee Rees Music: Tamar-kali Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski Release date: February 14, 2020 (Philadelphia, PA)/February 21, 2020 (Netflix) Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez, Carlos Leal, Julian Gamble. Box Office: N/A
Rating: *
Anne Hathaway is up for a Golden Raspberry Award for her performances in Serenity and The Hustle. If anybody remembers The Last Thing He Wanted come next January, she might just earn herself another Worst Actress nomination in 2021. To be fair, Hathaway is not the worst thing in this convoluted tale of journalism, politics and gun smuggling in Central America circa 1984. No, that would be the muddled screenplay by Marco Villalobos and Dee Rees, an adaptation of a novel by Joan Didion. While I haven’t actually read the book, it has to make more sense than the movie’s confused narrative about a journalist involved with illegal goings-on in Central America on behalf of her dying father. If not, it begs the question why they even bothered to adapt it in the first place. Either way, The Last Thing He Wanted is one big mess of a movie.
You pretty much know what to expect from The Last Thing He Wanted with Hathaway’s character’s opening narration. A narrative device typically meant to clarify instead muddies the waters before we even get a chance to dip in a single toe. It’s rambling, overlong and incomprehensible. For a minute, I thought I was watching a Terrence Malick movie. This plays out over scenes of Atlantic Post reporter Elena McMahon (Hathaway) covering the war in Nicaragua in 1982. She and her colleague Alma (Perez, Birds of Prey) are forced to flee after armed soldiers raid the newspaper office. Back in the US, Elena is taken off the Central America desk in ’84 and reassigned to the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign which isn’t exactly a dream job for her. In fact, she hates it.
Elena leaves the campaign trail after she receives word her father Richard (Dafoe, The Florida Project) is in the hospital. They’ve never been especially close. He walked out when she was a child and she’s never forgiven him. He appears to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He can’t seem to remember his ex-wife recently died; he keeps trying to call her. In any event, he asks his daughter to see to some business he has in Central America. In what can only be described as a huge stretch of credibility, he deals in the smuggling of illegal weapons to the Sandinistas. Elena takes his place in the drop-off only to find herself in over her head when the deal goes wrong. She spends the rest of the movie trying not to get killed.
If I’m making The Last Thing He Wanted sound straightforward, that is not my intention because nothing could be further from the truth. Somehow, a CIA agent named Treat Morrison (Affleck, Argo) figures into the fray. We first meet him at a press conference for a senator who’s involved in some way in the Central American situation. Elena asks him a question that gets a “no comment” answer. Treat stands off to the side waiting to help hustle the senator away. He later shows up in Central America just when Elena needs official-type help the most. Naturally, they wind up in bed together. We find out his character’s true purpose in the movie’s last few minutes and it’s just as dumb as everything else that precedes it. And believe me when I say there is a whole lot of “everything else”. After an inordinate amount of time is spent on establishing character and background, The Last Thing He Wanted basically descends into chaos with Elena making one dumb move after another while trying to stay ahead of whoever is trying to kill her. She’s supposedly an experienced journalist yet she doesn’t make much of an effort to be inconspicuous when she shoots pictures of armed soldiers at a Costa Rican warehouse. What’s even more incredulous is that none of them notice her doing this. It’s just one of many moments of extreme disbelief in a movie packed with wild coincidences and gaps in logic.
The acting in The Last Thing He Wanted is mostly horrendous. It can’t be said Hathaway doesn’t try. She does, but relies too much on a screenplay that ultimately lets her down by reducing her character to a fool whose every action paints a target on her back. It doesn’t seem that way early on in a clumsily executed scene in a bar where, in a moment of exposition, Elena relates her life story to her dad. She talks about her failed marriage, her young daughter in a boarding school and a battle with breast cancer. Other than a few telephone conversations with her daughter, none of this has anything to do with the price of tea in China which I’m surprised doesn’t come up at some point. Hathaway’s performance mainly consists of her smoking (a lot!), swearing (a lot!) and looking pissed off. It’s not much but she tries to make the best of it to no avail.
Affleck’s performance is generously described as wooden. He stands around looking glum and dull. A plastic mannequin could have played the role for all the life he puts into it. Dafoe‘s work in The Last Thing He Wanted is a prime example of an actor on autopilot. He does what he usually does in a handful of scenes and that’s it. It’s just enough to earn him that paycheck. I don’t know what function Perez’s character serves, but director Dee Rees (Mudbound) makes sure to let us know she’s gay. He also introduces a second gay character, an expatriate hotel owner (Jones, Infamous), late in the story. What’s going on here? Is he trying to please the LGBTQ community? Who knows?
In a movie where nothing is clear yet everything is stupid, the topper has to be the slow-motion death at the end. SPOILER ALERT! Somebody falls off a bluff after being shot in the chest. It’s as laughable as anything in Serenity. I watched The Last Thing He Wanted in total disbelief. It’s bad even for a Netflix movie. What exactly was Rees thinking? This movie is B-A-D BAD! If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it’s a parody of the political thrillers of 80s- e.g. Missing, Beyond the Limit, Under Fire and Salvador. But no, Rees means us to take it seriously. That, my friends, is the punchline to this terrible joke.
