{"id":8534,"date":"2024-11-18T23:52:07","date_gmt":"2024-11-19T04:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=8534"},"modified":"2024-11-18T23:52:07","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T04:52:07","slug":"the-last-thing-he-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/11\/18\/the-last-thing-he-wanted\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Thing He Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Last Thing He Wanted <\/strong>(2020)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Netflix\/Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 115 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, some violence, disturbing images, brief nudity)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Dee Rees\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Marco Villalobos and Dee Rees\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Tamar-kali\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: February 14, 2020 (Philadelphia, PA)\/February 21, 2020 (Netflix)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez, Carlos Leal, Julian Gamble.\u00a0 \u00a0 Box Office: N\/A<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: *<\/p>\n

\u00a0Anne Hathaway is up for a Golden Raspberry Award for her performances in Serenity and The Hustle. If anybody remembers The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> 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\u2019t actually read the book, it has to make more sense than the movie\u2019s 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<\/strong> is one big mess of a movie.<\/p>\n

\u00a0You pretty much know what to expect from The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> with Hathaway\u2019s character\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201984 and reassigned to the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign which isn\u2019t exactly a dream job for her. In fact, she hates it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Elena leaves the campaign trail after she receives word her father Richard (Dafoe, The Florida Project) is in the hospital. They\u2019ve never been especially close. He walked out when she was a child and she\u2019s never forgiven him. He appears to be in the early stages of Alzheimer\u2019s. He can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If I\u2019m making The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> 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\u2019s involved in some way in the Central American situation. Elena asks him a question that gets a \u201cno comment\u201d 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\u2019s true purpose in the movie\u2019s last few minutes and it\u2019s just as dumb as everything else that precedes it. And believe me when I say there is a whole lot of \u201ceverything else\u201d. After an inordinate amount of time is spent on establishing character and background, The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> 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\u2019s supposedly an experienced journalist yet she doesn\u2019t make much of an effort to be inconspicuous when she shoots pictures of armed soldiers at a Costa Rican warehouse. What\u2019s even more incredulous is that none of them notice her doing this. It\u2019s just one of many moments of extreme disbelief in a movie packed with wild coincidences and gaps in logic.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The acting in The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> is mostly horrendous. It can\u2019t be said Hathaway doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019m surprised doesn\u2019t come up at some point. Hathaway\u2019s performance mainly consists of her smoking (a lot!), swearing (a lot!) and looking pissed off. It\u2019s not much but she tries to make the best of it to no avail.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Affleck\u2019s 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\u2018s work in The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> is a prime example of an actor on autopilot. He does what he usually does in a handful of scenes and that\u2019s it. It\u2019s just enough to earn him that paycheck. I don\u2019t know what function Perez\u2019s character serves, but director Dee Rees (Mudbound) makes sure to let us know she\u2019s gay. He also introduces a second gay character, an expatriate hotel owner (Jones, Infamous), late in the story. What\u2019s going on here? Is he trying to please the LGBTQ community? Who knows?<\/p>\n

\u00a0In a movie where nothing is clear yet everything is stupid, the topper has to be the slow-motion death at the end. SPOILER ALERT! <\/strong>Somebody falls off a bluff after being shot in the chest. It\u2019s as laughable as anything in Serenity. I watched The Last Thing He Wanted<\/strong> in total disbelief. It\u2019s bad even for a Netflix movie. What exactly was Rees thinking? This movie is B-A-D BAD! If I didn\u2019t know better, I\u2019d swear it\u2019s 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.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Netflix\/Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 115 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, some violence, disturbing images, brief nudity)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Dee Rees\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Marco Villalobos and Dee Rees\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Tamar-kali\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: February 14, 2020 (Philadelphia, PA)\/February 21, 2020 (Netflix)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones, Edi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8803,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dramas","category-this-sucks-so-bad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/The-Last-Thing-He-Wanted-PI.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8534"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8805,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8534\/revisions\/8805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}