Rating: 10/20
Plot: A girl with missing limbs tries to find friends in a dystopian wasteland.
Ana Lily Amipour's follow-up to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is disappointing.
Amipour's visual sense is still on display as she takes advantage of desert landscapes and litters each shot with trash, giant boomboxes, and ravens. Like with the cat in he debut, she shows off an ability to direct animals. This time, it's giant black birds. They might be crows actually. Like alligators and crocodiles, which I famously can't tell apart, I have trouble with my black birds.
A lot of this movie works without dialogue, and it's likely more effective when it's free of spoken words. Visually, this movie is almost a success.
Everything else, however, is a failure. The characters are flat. Keanu Reeves plays a sort of post-apocalyptic prophet called The Dream, but the character is lackadaisically realized, and you never really understand or even care to understand what he's going on about. There's more star power with Jim Carrey. He plays a filthy hermit, and he actually doesn't say a word during any of his scenes. The character didn't need to be played by Jim Carrey. It's not that he was distracting. It's more to do that his presence in the credits made me expect a little more from the character. Jason Momoa gives me no hope for the Justice League movie in which he plays Fish Man because he's almost unintelligible and oddly shaped and has almost no charisma at all. And speaking of no charisma, how about Suki Waterhouse, the actress who plays the character who I guess is supposed to be the main character? Early in the movie, cannibals eat one of her legs and one of her arms, and I think they must have eaten most of her personality as well.
Really, a lack of personality might be the biggest issue with this movie. It's not just the characters; it's really the entire movie that just doesn't have a personality. It definitely doesn't have much of a plot, more a series of things that happen that are sort of related. I can handle a lack of plot, but added to that lack of personality, it becomes a little more of a problem.
I had high hopes for this one because of the director's feature debut and my love of movies involving cannibalism and giant boom boxes, but it's definitely what you'd call a sophomore slump. Hopefully, Amipour can continue to take chances and bounce back.
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