McConaughey, who has mad more than his share of seaside tales, gives fair value in delivering salty lines.īut it’s at that midpoint that Knight, an accomplished writer who let his director of photography talk him into a few too many pointlessly showy circle-the-character pans, takes a turn towards the desperate and turns his plot and his movie inside out. ![]() The setting, the sexy tone, the cast and snippets of sharp dialogue tamped down my eye rolling through the film’s first half. The guy keeps running down the dock, just seconds late in catching Dill, or taking off his expensive shoes to wade into the surf after him. She wants her husband to go fishing, and not come back.ĭill is also being pursued by this mysterious nerd in a business suit ( Jeremy Strong of “The Big Short” and “Detroit”). She plays the pity story, claims she’s being beaten. She shows a little leg and comes on to him. They see the new blonde (Hathaway) who shows up, even if they don’t know Dill and Karen’s shared past. Everybody knows Dill’s story, knows who he sleeps with and the state of his finances because “Down here, everybody knows everything.” “You fish for ONE tuna,” one and all agree. He pulls a knife on two customers who try to take the rod and fight the fish onto the boat on THEIR charter in an opening scene. It’s a giant tuna he keeps hooking and never landing. His righteous, works-with-nuns first mate (“Amistad” co-star Djimon Hounsou) cannot cure Dill of his obsession, his Great White Whale. “A hooker who can’t afford his hooks,” he agrees. McConaughey is Baker Dill, a hard-drinking hard-luck charter captain on tiny Plymouth Island, which has but one bar - The Rope and Anchor - and one cougar ( Diane Lane) to keep him afloat. With plot contrivances piling up alongside McConaughey nude scenes, interrupted by moments where he tosses back his head and howls, Hathaway vamping up the ex lover who tries every argument in the book to talk this charter fishing boat captain into killing her brutish husband ( Jason Clarke, perfectly vile), one is tempted to say that the only thing that worked here were the sales pitches. ![]() And just as its not amounting to much, writer-director Steven Knight’s script (he wrote “Dirty Pretty Things” and “Locke”) takes a deep dive into flipping genres and reframing the narrative. It’s not much of a movie, an overboiled, rum-and-sex-soaked neo-noir about deep sea fishing, predestination and murder. Sell the all-star cast on a paid Mauritius working vacation. Matthew McConaughey skinny dipping, Anne Hathaway as a femme fatale, Oscar winners and “Interstellar” co-stars sharing sex scenes in a Virgin Islands (actually, Maritius in the Indian Ocean) setting. Here’s how “Serenity” was sold to overseas investors, and then to nascent studio Aviron, and how they in turn are selling it to us. There’s a lot of salesmanship that sits, obvious to the naked eye, in “Serenity.”
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