The movies are great. Who doesn’t love the movies? Who wouldn’t want their world to be more exciting with more attractive people in it? Who wouldn’t like a happy ending? The movies don’t merely entertain, sometimes they go as far as to attempt to rewire our brains. Lately, it has been doing that with ages.
Granted, movie stars don’t age like their audiences. They take a much more gracious, much more time/gravity/logic defying approach fueled good genetics, good grooming, and other, more chemically based, interventions. And still, every so often you just gotta go…WTF? Like when Melissa McCarthy’s latest movie cast her (a woman just entering her 50s) as a grieving mother of a baby? Or like when Ms. Berry has recently cast herself (a woman well into her 50s) as an ass-kicking mother of a 6-year-old? Or as Sandra Bullock has just done a turn as a 57-year-old woman who appears to be playing a 40-year-old character? Mind you, all of these women do look younger than their ages and some of them did defy nature enough to have babies very late in life, but still…you CAN tell, and it IS distracting. And so, when Sandra Bullock plays a woman who just got done serving a 20-year sentence for protecting her baby sister by allegedly shooting a sheriff (but she didn’t shoot no deputy) and here Bullock plays both her younger self and her current self, while her baby sister is four or five to start with and 24 or 25 later, it is genuinely distracting. Am I an agist? Sure, call me an agist. But this isn’t without merit. When we first meet Bullock’s character, the kid doesn’t seem like her (even much younger) sister, the kid seems like her kid. In later scenes too. They are just too obviously far apart in age. In fact, Bullock’s character implies she’s about 40 in present day by saying she spent 50% of her life in prison, and maybe women coming out of a 20-year sentence do look like they very well preserved mid 50s, but …do they? Bullock has always been a strange-looking actress - so precision-chiseled – but now that she appears to be stuck that way, it’s just too glaringly obvious. Why is this review ALL about looks and ages? Well, because it’s everywhere and, like the emperor’s new clothes, no one is talking about it. And when these things are salient to the plot, when they distract from the plot, it seems worth mentioning. Even if it’s just one ranty review no one will ever read. But also, let’s talk about the movie. It’s apparently based on Unforgiven, which is a very good BBC show that relies on the exceptional memory of possible criminals. Which is to say it deals with historical crimes and then tracks down those involved and they all remember the events of 20/30/40 years ago like it was yesterday despite often being advanced in years. Kinda crazy, but the acting and the writings so good, you forget about it. Now quite the case with this movie, though. The acting’s good, Bullock does her level-best, and the writing’s decent enough, but the directing is overdone. With the incessant repetitive flashbacks and slow-boiling plot, the movie drags. Not terribly so, but noticeably. Straight down to its clichéd redemption-flavored lachrymose denouement. Netflix’s #1 hit prior to being unseated by the boombastic Red Notice was Bullock’s previous vehicle, Bird Box. Now that was a legitimately good movie. She’s obviously trying to get back there again with this movie, but it just isn’t the same, no matter how heartstringtuggingly maudlin it gets. It’s entertaining enough and you’re not likely to want your time back (not all of it anyway), but it’s just ok of a movie. It might have been pretty great as a season of Unforgiven – BBC has a fundamental understanding of casting real looking people to play real looking people of appropriate ages and all that, but the hollywooden and hollyplasticed approach on top of oversimplifying the entire production for the backseats just doesn’t quite cut it. It’s forgivable, it’s more along the lines of unmemorable. Next up is presumably Nicole Kidman, who barely looks real anymore, playing a 30-year-old mother of a baby? Or something of that (un)nature.
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