Still: Grappling with moral gray areas is a standard trope of film noir, so we’ll give Serenity the benefit of the doubt and say that it hasn’t shifted genres again yet. Duke seems to be a superfluous character since Baker is pretty adamant that he will not commit murder no matter how badly the son of a bitch might deserve it. Enter Duke (Djimon Hounsou: Aquaman, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), Baker’s occasional first mate and regular preacher, who guesses what Baker has been asked to do and informs Baker that “there is a God” who will stand in judgment, etc, etc. Sure, he drinks too much - thanks to “Iraq and the medals” - and is constantly broke, but this is a request too far. Karen proposes that Baker take Frank out fishing, get him drunk, and push him overboard to swim with the fishes.īaker refuses: he’s a screwup, but not that big a screwup. She has a sob story about how Frank beats her and sexually abuses her, and how he treats Karen’s son, tween Patrick (Rafael Sayegh) - who is Baker’s biological child, not that he’s seen the kid in years - like dirt. Second up, after the man-versus-fish adventure, and not-at-all spoilery, we have film noir: Baker Dill’s (McConaughey: Gold, Sing) slinky, sultry ex, Karen (Anne Hathaway: Ocean’s Eight, Colossal), shows up outta nowhere and offers him ten million dollars in cash to kill her mobster husband, Frank Zariakas (Jason Clarke: First Man, Winchester). Partly because he does so with a gleeful caprice that is far less about exploring any of the huge ideas and should-be meaningful concepts he plays with than it is about simply fucking with the audience because he can. And, indeed, Knight fails in ways that are equal parts baffling and (accidentally) hilarious, shifting genres like to give you cinematic whiplash, and in a way seemingly specifically guaranteed not to satisfy fans of any of the hugely disparate story styles his movie invokes. Mostly they don’t dare because it’s really really tough to pull off what writer-director Steven Knight ( The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Allied) is trying to pull off here. I mean, sure, insert Moby-Dick ref here, but you cannot even begin to comprehend where this movie is going to go with this, or where it’s going to take itself, merrily, with the sort of no-fucks-given abandon that too few movies dare. The moment is deeply, deeply bizarre, far more so than words can convey, and yet Serenity has only just gotten started. He needs to be the one to catch it, and he will cut anyone who gets in his way. In the opening scene of the mind-numbingly bonkers Serenity, a wild-eyed Matthew McConaughey, as the skipper of a boat with the titular name, pulls a knife on the “paying customers” he has taken out fishing from his home base of the vaguely Caribbean-ish “Plymouth Island,” because he thinks they’ve got on their line “the Beast,” the giant tuna he is absolutely obsessed with catching.
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