** outta *****

2 outta 5

Serenity is a mixed misfire of a movie. First off, it stole the title from the iconic sci-fi franchise Firefly and its sequel movie also titled Serenity. This isn’t titled Serenity for any good sort of thematic reason either, just that the boat of the main character is named Serenity. Anyway, this is a crazy movie that doesn’t come together coherently, it’s basically two types of movies smashed on top of each other with good actors in service of an awkward script. But sometimes it is entertaining because of how bananas it gets. It doesn’t quite work as genre mash ups should, Firefly is a good genre mash up that elegantly weaves together westerns and sci-fi. Serenity is a sort of noir erotic thriller and philosophical rumination that suddenly becomes a false reality fantasy piece. With a lot of hollering and bloodshed. At least it sticks to its trashy principles.

Baker (Matthew McConaughey) is a fisherman on the small island of Plymouth, drinking his days away and obsessed with catching a giant tuna. One night his former flame shows up, Karen (Anne Hathaway) telling him she is in a bad spot with her abusive criminal husband, Frank (Jason Clarke) and her and Baker’s love child is in danger. She wants Baker to get Frank drunk, take him out to sea, and toss him overboard for 10 million dollars. Baker considers murdering Frank, especially when he seems to have a mental connection with his son across the world. But soon a stuck-up salesman Reid (Jeremy Strong) arrives with a revelation; he knows everything about Baker’s life, what he is planning, what will happen, and he tells him reality may not be what is seems.

The first half of the movie is dry involving a whole lot of McConaughey bedding local women, drunkenly muttering, people telling him he’s a great fisherman and staring pensively off into the distance while obsessed with catching a big tuna. He is so crazy in the opening scene he almost catches the big fish and pulls a knife of his passengers to ensure his catch. It’s the usual McConaughey character trope of being the best there is except this guy is really depressed about it. Then Hathaway’s character shows up and it sort of becomes about a femme fatale trying to manipulate him into doing her bidding. More yammering ensues with vaguely sinister overtones as the music by Benjamin Wallfisch makes atonal noise.

Hathaway and McConaughey are actually much better than the script. They play their roles very straight and serious which unfortunately makes the big twist seem corny because throughout the film they’re basically in a relationship melodrama. There is a bit much of McConaughey being moody to the point where he goes for a pointless gloomy skinny-dipping sequence that goes on for much too long. Clarke is still doing his Teddy Kennedy impression from the movie Chappaquiddick which is oddly kind of funny. There is nothing redeeming about his character in the film as he’s almost cartoonishly evil, boozing hard, flouting his cash and having a creepy abusive relationship with his wife. But Clarke acts like such a lout and commits to the crazy tone so it is entertaining. Diane Lane plays the sexy older woman who Baker seems to be bedding for money but it’s really hard to buy that Lane would pay for love because she’s freakin’ Diane Lane. As Baker’s co-pilot, Djimon Hounsou says very serious things about what is going to happen to Baker if he keeps doing nefarious things. 

The second half of the movie is where it gets strange and not really in a good way but in a cheesy, corny yet much more entertaining way. There are good twists in movies that flip the entire thing on its head but the twist as Baker starts to question the nature of his reality is just too tonally left field. This is basically done in an entire information dump by Strong’s businessman and his character could be called Exposition Guy. Strong’s character shows up randomly in the first half sort of like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland constantly worrying about being too late. It is trying to give him a mythical feel of destiny but doesn’t really work. The movie plays with if this is a drunken delusion or if Baker has someone above controlling things, although it is really improbable that anybody would make a drunk Matthew McConaughey fisherman simulation. Cutting to the mastermind manipulating Baker’s life just reinforces how awkward the big plot twist is. To be fair, the second half of the movie does sort of explain why everyone is so single minded in the first half. It’s a bad twist but it is compelling bad. The very end tries to play what happens as uplifting and hopeful which is just bizarre.

Serenity is a movie that swings wide and misses. It isn’t self-aware enough to be amusing as it takes itself way too seriously. It is half a moralistic thriller about a broken dude with false reality twists awkwardly wedged on top of it. There might be a cool idea here but it is lost underneath all of the grim darkness, campiness and nonsense.