Hot off the Fury Road, Charlize burns a hole with Dark Places.
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| "Trucker hat. Dig." |
Last year’s Gone Girl
took the masterfully paced and sharply written Gillian Flynn novel of the same
name and brought it to the silver screen with the help of a talented director
and a skilled cast. Unsurprisingly,
Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places,
was rapidly adapted and will see a theatrical release in early August
2015. Available now, however, on DirecTV
– how does the film fare in its small screen debut?
In short, not particularly well. Unlike the subject matter upon which the
movie is based, the film adaptation of Dark
Places feels forced. What should
have made for a tense, character driven thriller feels ultimately flat –
largely uninteresting cinematography, some lazy performances, and a forgettable
soundtrack – Dark Places is perhaps
best described in one word: “meh".
Not a bad movie, to be sure, but an immensely weak follow-up
to the haunting and beautiful Gone Girl. Charlize Theron’s portrayal of Libby Day, our
flawed and barely likeable hero, lacks any meaningful depth. Supposedly haunted by the trauma of her past,
proclaiming herself tainted by “bad blood” and nearly constant anger, Theron
appears to do little to bring these raw emotions to the forefront of her
performance. A similar sense of vague
laziness corrupts Chloë Grace Moretz’s turn as Diondra in the film’s flashback
scenes. Both of these actresses have
more than proven their acting chops in their careers, which is perhaps simply
an indictment of the film’s director Gilles Paquet-Brenner.
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| "We're here to defend the Confederate flag." |
Even the story elements pulled from the novel struggle to
meet the audience’s expectations. While
the novel is filled with subtleties and misdirection, the film practically
bashes the viewer upside the head with foreshadowing. One could make the argument that this isn’t a
fair complaint from a viewer that already experienced the story through the
original subject matter, but a good mystery story should only get better on
subsequent viewing – clues should be clever and rewarding to the careful eye –
no such care is necessary for a viewer of Dark
Places. Perhaps the best scenes in
the film are unintentional; several moments capture the awkward idiocy of
misguided teenagers rather brilliantly, although I’m not so certain that was
the intended effect.
Sadly, even the film’s denouement felt anemic, despite its
bold and creative twists. Even if the
viewer is totally blindsided by these moments, the weak camera work and
accompanying soundtrack do little to capture the viewer in the horror. Save your summer movie budget for something a bit more
worthwhile.
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SCORE
-Patrick B. McDonald