{"id":8882,"date":"2024-11-25T14:55:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T19:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=8882"},"modified":"2024-11-25T14:55:05","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T19:55:05","slug":"serenity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/11\/25\/serenity\/","title":{"rendered":"Serenity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Serenity<\/strong> (2019)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Aviron\/Suspense-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 106 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language throughout, sexual content, some bloody images)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Steven Knight\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Steven Knight\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Benjamin Wallfisch\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jess Hall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: January 25, 2019 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Charlotte Butler, David Butler, Rafael Sayegh.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $8.5M (US)\/$14.4M (World)<\/p>\n

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

Serenity<\/strong> was bumped from a fall release date to the dump month that is January. What does that tell you? Normally, I\u2019d say it tells you all you need to know about the movie in question. However, that is NOT the case with Serenity<\/strong>. I don\u2019t ordinarily subscribe to hyperbole, but I\u2019m not exaggerating when I say that it\u2019s a one of a kind viewing experience. I\u2019m certain I\u2019ve never seen anything quite like it; I would surely remember a movie as utterly inane and insane as Serenity<\/strong>. It\u2019s a cinematic dark cloud, that\u2019s for sure, but it does have a silver lining. It\u2019s watchable albeit for all the wrong reasons. The first truly bad movie of 2019 is also the best unintentional comedy I\u2019ve seen since Gotti. I got more laughs out of it than I did many of the last decade\u2019s actual comedies combined. I think we\u2019re looking at a new bad movie classic here.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Serenity<\/strong>, which was released with no marketing that I saw (except for a trailer last summer), is billed as a neo-noir thriller. It stars Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club) as the improbably named Baker Dill, a psychologically scarred Iraq War vet who spends his days swilling rum and taking tourists out on his fishing boat on a tropical island called Plymouth. He\u2019s obsessed with catching this giant tuna he\u2019s named \u201cJustice\u201d (no, that\u2019s not subtle at all). He has his Captain Ahab moment early on when he commandeers a paying customer\u2019s fishing pole after he snags his…. uh, giant white tuna? His first mate is a chap named Duke (Hounsou, Blood Diamond) who more often acts as a moral compass for Baker than anything else.<\/p>\n

\u00a0One day, a woman from Baker\u2019s past comes back into his life. It\u2019s Karen (Hathaway, Les Miserables), his ex with whom he has a son he hasn\u2019t seen in years. She comes to him with a proposal; she will pay him $10 million to take her abusive, wealthy husband Frank (Clarke, Chappaquiddick) out on his boat, get him drunk and feed him to the sharks. Should he do it or not? It\u2019s the same question asked by many a poor dope when approached by a sexy femme fatale type.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So far Serenity<\/strong> has all the trappings of a film noir. We think we know where writer-director Steven Knight (Locke) is going with all this. That\u2019s when he pulls a fast one and Serenity<\/strong> really goes off the rails. I won\u2019t say what happens, but trust me when I say it makes an already wacko movie even more so. I\u2019ll also say that instead of clearing things up, it convolutes things further. Okay, enough about that.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The acting and dialogue in Serenity<\/strong> is just as wacko. It\u2019s especially disheartening when you consider it stars two Oscar winners and two nominees. McConaughey devours the scenery with his crazy, wild-eyed performance in which he spends a disturbing amount of time jumping off cliffs naked (he calls it \u201ctaking a shower\u201d) and yelling at the sky like he\u2019s King Lear. Hathaway, with her dark locks dyed blonde, is simply terrible. She\u2019s completely miscast as a femme fatale; she looks lost at sea here. Diane Lane (Unfaithful) plays a character who exists for no other purpose than to have sex with McConaughey (and pay him for it, no less). She serves no function to the plot whatsoever. Clarke\u2019s portrayal of a human monster who drinks too much, beats his wife and hunts for underage girls in a sleazy part of the island is cartoonish at best. Everybody on this island seems off in some way. It\u2019s almost like an insane asylum that reeks of bait and chum. And I haven\u2019t even mentioned the bespectacled, briefcase-toting fellow (Strong, The Big Short) who keeps trying to catch up with Baker. He needs to talk to him, but keeps missing him. This might or might not be a slight spoiler, but I kept waiting for him to walk on water at some point. Don\u2019t read too much into that; it\u2019s just one of many weird thoughts that crept into my head as I incredulously watched Serenity<\/strong> unfold.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m not lying when I say that I haven\u2019t laughed this hard in a long time. Serenity<\/strong> is ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, silly, nonsensical, bizarre, strange, kooky, out there and just plain weird. It makes zero sense even after the big plot twist. It\u2019s a cross between a crazy dream and an acid trip. Does Knight intend for us to take Serenity<\/strong> seriously or is it some kind of parody? It has all the pulp fiction archetypes and story clich\u00e9s yet it all feels curiously out of place. The story zags when it\u2019s supposed to zig and vice versa. The dialogue is incredibly cheesy. Some of the lines the actors are forced to say even look painful. This movie is laughable. It\u2019s the kind of movie you watch with your friends so you can all make fun of it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So what am I saying here? I\u2019m not entirely sure. It\u2019s hard to put into words how I really feel about Serenity<\/strong>. I don\u2019t hate it but I don\u2019t like it either. I\u2019m not saying to see it but I\u2019m not saying to not see it either. I guess what I\u2019m saying is that Serenity<\/strong> needs to be seen to be believed and even then you won\u2019t believe it. It\u2019s like an out-of-body experience in that you\u2019re never sure you saw what you just saw. It\u2019s positively surreal. It\u2019s a bad movie but a great bad movie. Take that however you will.\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Serenity (2019)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Aviron\/Suspense-Thriller\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 106 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language throughout, sexual content, some bloody images)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Steven Knight\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Steven Knight\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Benjamin Wallfisch\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Jess Hall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: January 25, 2019 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Diane Lane, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Charlotte Butler, David Butler, Rafael Sayegh.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $8.5M […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guilty-pleasures","category-suspense-thrillers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/Serenity-PIC.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\/8882","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=8882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9102,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8882\/revisions\/9102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}