Velvet Buzzsaw

2019 arsty thriller

Rating: 9/20

Plot: Works of art start killing people.

You're very aware that there's a script here. This thing is written hard, and that makes nearly everything--the characterization, the suspense, the satire of the art world--feel completely flat. The cool animated credits are the highlight of this one as it's downhill from there, a crazy-but-not-crazy-enough frustratingly incoherent downhill ride. If you've got a movie that has more visual reminders that Starbucks exists than combined laughs and scares, then you've got a horror-comedy (which is what I think this is supposed to be) that has some problems.

The last time Jake Gyllenhaal worked with Dan Gilroy worked out fine although this is the kind of movie that can make you wonder if something like Nightcrawler is really as good as you remember it. Here, Gyllenhaal is trying very hard in what is a borderline offensive performance. Every blink is mannered, and it seems like he's trying to win an Academy Award with his fingers. Worse might be Rene Russo. She's terrible. So is the music. John Malkovich is apparently only doing Netflix projects now. He's better here than he is in Bird Box and seems like he might care a tad bit more. And he gets to show off his basketball game, his second best scene. I won't share the other because it would be a spoiler, but I liked it a lot. So I guess I did like something other than the animated opening credits.

This skewering of the art world is about as obvious and juvenile as it could be. Greed and exploitation gets punished, pompous critics and art-world dilettantes are lambasted, and somebody mistakes a few bags of trash for a work of modern art. It's the sort of thing that's been done better before and will be done better again.

The suspenseful parts weren't quite cheesy or campy enough, and they definitely weren't thrilling or horrifying enough. Things happened, and then I kind of just waited for more things to happen. I didn't care about a single character, and that probably didn't help matters.

Netflix is starting to tick me off again. After Private Lives, Happy as Lazarro, and Roma, I was pretty excited about the possibilities, but they're off to a bad start in 2019.