Serenity ★★★
EVEN though you may end up hating it, you should still watch Serenity.
It’s one of those movies that proceeds along nicely for an hour or so before taking a radical detour.
Of course I’m only going to tell you about the film on the surface; you’ll have to make up your own mind about the rest.
I watched it with my son at home and we had to stop the film to discuss for a couple of minutes what had just happened before proceeding.
This pause actually helped and ultimately we felt the film worked, even though it wasn’t what we had expected or would have preferred.
Matthew McConaughey, everybody’s favourite player of intelligent stoners, is Baker Dill, the skipper of a fishing and charter vessel working from a small island off the southern US coast.
Dill is a difficult individual to say the least. We first encounter his erratic ways during a charter fishing trip when one of the guests hooks something on a line. Dill realises it is a particular massive tuna that he has been stalking for years and becomes absolutely focused on landing the fish.
One of the guests demands to take the line, after all he’s paid for the privilege, but Dill is having none of that – this is his fish and his boat. The guests become beligerent at his attitude and Dill ends up pulling a knife on them. His deckhand Duke, played by Djimon Hounsou, has to defuse the situation.
The monster tuna, nicknamed ‘Justice’ by Dill, once again evades landing and Dill’s customers refuse to pay. You get the clear feeling this has happened before.
Dill, an Iraq War veteran, is also unbending in his attitude to commercial fishing. Refusing to chase the more lucrative swordfish because they only run at night and this would interfere with his drinking. He gets some spare cash from Constance, played by Diane Lane, a local woman he is having a kind-of relationship with, but it’s not enough to keep afloat.
Suddenly, into Dill’s life walks his ex-wife Karen, played by a blonde Anne Hathaway. In classic femme-fatale style, she tells Dill that her rich new husband physically and mentally abuses her.
She has arranged for the husband, Frank, to join her and go out on a fishing trip with Dill. She offers Dill ten million dollars to kill her husband on the trip.
Interesting set-up right? Rife for twists and turns and some smoky noir-based drama. Well it has them, but nothing like you would expect.
McConaghey and Hathaway both give their usual solid performances but I should single out Australian Jason Clarke as the husband Frank, one of the vilest but still believable characters I’ve seen on screen in a while.
Queenslander Clarke started his career in 1995 on local television. It took 17 years to achieve his big breaker as a CIA torturer in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty.
In the seven years since he has appeared in 17 films, including most recently playing Edward Kennedy in Chappaquiddick. We’ll see him next in the remake of Pet Sematary.
The film is written and directed by Steven Knight who has a varied record. He’s only directed a couple of previous films but one was the excellent one-hander with Tom Hardy called Locke from 2013.
He’s best known for writing but for every success like Locke or Burnt, he also has the pedestrian The Girl in the Spider’s Web or the dud Allied in his credits.
Serenity lies somewhere between the two, requiring a careful balancing of the elements from two different genres in the hope of creating a satisfying merger. It’s a very interesting experiment and one that mostly succeeds and is worth the investment.