There once was a director who liked to mess with the concept of time. Not only did he make his name on it with the ever so striking Memento, but he continued to boggle the audiences’ minds with movies like Prestige and Inception. Sure, he did straight forward ventures too, the appropriately dark Dark Knight that got Bruce Wayne just right and the war epic Dunkirk, but it seems that his passion laid with temporal disturbances and back to it he went. And made Tenet. Even the title is a palindrome that can be read in either direction. You are therefore warned...it's going to get very clever very soon.
The basic concept is as wild as any this mad genius of a writer/director has ever come up with, follows a secret agent who learns to manipulate the flow of time to prevent an attack from the future that threatens to annihilate the present world. And yes, that was grabbed from Wikipedia, because I might not have been able to sum it up quite so succinctly. And I may not be the only one. Because this gets explained throughout the movie numerous times by numerous characters. Everyone’s basically going around dodging reversed bullets trying to figure out what’s going on. We do know the responsible party, an oligarch played by Branagh with such vicious gusto that he is positively unrecognizable in some close ups. And then there’s his wife played by the distractingly tall and surprisingly excellent Debicki. Seriously, I seem to only remember her from the ridiculous Gatsby adaptation and nothing about that movie really jumped out in a good way, but here she absolutely shines. She also towers in either stilettos or flats over everyone in the cast, she’s so strikingly tall, she appears slightly surreal (on par with the movie itself) like something from the more realistic of surreal art. The character she plays in the movie is trapped in a loveless marriage with a complex and frightening man and she is by turns devastated and devastating, desperate and dangerous. The scenes between her and Branagh are by far and away the best in the movie. The rest of the cast seemingly doesn’t need to do as much, because they are all too busy being action guys, bullet dodging and all. You got the teen vampire all grown up and smoldering and strangely charming and a not all that smoldering or charming or even especially charismatic lead, the unnamed Protagonist. And that, aside from Tenet’s overall muddled plot and the overindulgent length, might be the movie’s main detractor. John David Washington is an apple that rolled so far from his Denzel Washington papa tree, I didn’t even make the connection until afterwards. Wherein Denzel is one of the best actors of his generation with a strikingly consistent record of acting excellence, his baby boy isn’t even in the same league. Sure, he’s got the leading man good looks and he isn’t untalented as such, he just doesn’t have the screen presence to carry an entire movie. Muscles…yes, really neatly groomed facefur…yes, swagger…too much, but that’s just it, his entire game is mainly swagger. Just strutting through the scenes in designer suits like a model/actor in a music video is pretty much what he does outside of action. Not a hopeless case by any means, might one day get to be somewhere, but as of now, nowhere near on the level it requires to lead a movie like this. Why him? What sort of a choice was that for a director whose work normally features absolutely perfectly cast protagonists from tweaked out Guy Pearce to the stoically mesmerizing Christian Bale? No idea. And weirdly enough the movie also features a very beefy and bearded Aaron Johnson Taylor, who is no stranger to leading huge action productions and plenty charismatic, in a small meaningless and thankless supporting role. Now if someone just switched the two actors, it would have been a much more compelling movie to watch. So anyway, that’s Tenet. A wildly imagined, miscast, confusing, almost too clever for its own good, visually striking mess of a movie that features the most original use of bullets since The Matrix. Definitely more of an acquired choice than the rest of this auteur’s spectacular catalog. User mileage may vary.
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