Louder Than Bombs, a dire misfire of familial tragedy.
Louder Than Bombs: a muted explosion of bad storytelling by an unfocused and self indulgent director satisfying his own needs while ignoring what his audience needs, a story.
Silence can be a movie's best friend. It can move a scene. It can define important moments. It can work under the careful supervision of a talented director with actors that know how to use that silence to full effect. Here, it's a painfully pointless representation of a movie that never had a chance under the guidance of a self serving, motiveless man behind the camera.
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| So, you're saying you're Lex Luthor. I don't believe you. |
We've all experienced death and personal misfortune. Films like The House of Sand and Fog, The Descendants or We Need To Talk About Kevin all connect with us as an audience through great storytelling and the shaping of impassioned or mentally incapable archetypes. Sometimes though, the films that are meant to make that connection take a horizontal shift, abandoning us in a meandering story void of anything truly worthwhile. That's the case here. Louder Than Bombs is a dour telling of mourning that fails in every light.
Existing in our modern, technology shaped world, Louder Than Bombs is a film that cloaks exposition in bizarre artistic silences that ultimately fail the far greater dynamic that lies underneath a deeply veiled story about family. From the opening moments, the movie expects its audience to revel in the strange and surreal presentation of this director's ineptitude at crafting characters we can connect with. With a heart wrenching back story rooted in the senses of loss and tragedy, nothing here ever hits the right notes.
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| These chairs are really too small for us. |
On the surface, this dramatic film has a phenomenal cast. However, Louder Than Bombs almost immediately becomes a caricature like presentation with three male leads taking on different yet standard emotive characteristics that feel false and unrealistic. We're given the late life crisis of Gabriel Byrne, the midlife questions of Jesse Eisenberg, and the depressed years of teenage bastard child Devin Druid. Quite obviously we're meant to be experiencing the triangle like story of these three male leads all at different intersections in their respective lives. Louder Than Bombs presents a film study of the flawed male psyche and it just doesn't work.
Wasting these fine actors like this is a defined revelation unto itself. It's a nearly impossible deed that drags audiences through the dregs of watching great actors flounder for nothing. With a ludicrously boring story that never goes anywhere, save yourself the time and pain of sitting through this dreadful motion picture.
Beware. Share.
Score
-CG