Serentiy (Review)
Serenity Chooses to Sink Rather than Swim.
On paper, Serenity seems like it could be the kind of thriller to rival the likes of Searching and A Simple Favor from 2018. After all, it’s got the likes of Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, and even Djimon Hounsou. Even the trailer made it look like the kind of movie that could be a perfect example of neo-noir. However, it becomes clear early on that writer-director Steven Knight learned all he “needed to learn” about the genre from Wikipedia. Instead of quenching my thirst for an enthralling thriller, Serenity proves to be a groan-worthy movie that I came dangerously close to walking out of.
McConaughey has grown tremendously as an actor over the years. Of course, his main claim to fame in recent memory is Dallas Buyers Club, but he’s even proven to be a new man when it comes to minor roles like the one in White Boy Rick last year. This begs the question, why would he star in a total piece of trash like Serenity? More importantly, I have to wonder how the rest of the cast was roped into it. Don’t get me wrong, it seems like it could be a perfectly adequate thriller. Hathaway’s character shows up out of the blue in an attempt to rope her ex-husband (McConaughey) into killing her new and super abusive piece of garbage husband (Clarke). Like I said, on paper, it seems pretty perfect. You have a man roped into a situation that’s bound to potentially ruin his life and the perfect cast to pull off all the right noir cliches we’ve all come to love over the years. So, what went wrong?
Well, in order to stay “hip” or “relevant” Knight implements a twist that would embarrass even M. Night Shyamalan. At this point, I would say something to the effect of “spoiler alert,” but this is one spoiler I think audiences deserve to know they are walking into. You see, Serenity isn’t a straight-up thriller. If that were all it was, then perhaps it would stand a chance to walk away unscathed by my utter contempt for the film. Instead, I’m going to spoil it for you right now and save you not only the price of admission but nearly two hours of your life. Halfway through the film, it’s revealed that the entire thing is a video game programmed by a middle scholar. Don’t worry, because there aren’t any tiny hints or details that hint at this “big reveal.” Instead, this is thrown out a little halfway through the film when a random stranger shows up and simply reveals it. The rest of Serenity desperately tries to justify this horrendous twist, but only proves that this film is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is.
I’m sure you’re probably wondering what I could possibly mean with that reveal, but it’s all as straightforward as it comes. The world the entire movie takes place in is a video game and one that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. So, why would Knight insert this little twist in what could have been a film about struggling with the gray area that most of us live in try to get through on a daily basis? I have no idea because this is a twist that doesn’t make any sense at all. It certainly doesn’t add anything to the overall story or plot. In fact, it pretty much eviscerates the moral conflict McConaughey might be going through at any point in the film because, well, he’s not human. He’s some teenagers idea of what an adult might be and it slowly becomes very clear that is exactly how he was written.
If the twist was the only thing wrong with Serenity, I could maybe work with that. Instead, though, the film moves at a breakneck pace in order to get to this unfullfilling twist and in doing so never takes the time to let the moral ambiguity set in for the characters. For the hero, he seems to struggle with the choice of helping his ex-wife until the moment he learns none of this really matters. At that point, he’s all too willing to not only accept that he doesn’t exist but to also ignore any potential repercussions that might come with, well, cold-blooded murder. There is no question about reality or the inherent value in his existence. Instead, he just goes for it, because of reasons.
Serenity is a trash fire of a movie. It’s the first film I’ve been legitimately angered by in a long time. It had so much potential to tell a “seemingly” straight forward story and rely on the internal struggle of the characters to navigate their ways through tumultuous waters, but instead, it lazily falls back on an infantile understanding of gaming and artificial intelligence. In other words, Serenity is a movie that has no idea what it is talking about and that becomes painfully clear all too early in the film. The rest of the movie is simply riding out the wave of regret you will get from actually paying money to see it.
