Anne’s sweet romcom is hijacked by Godzilla
THIS extravagantly misbegotten film begins in the style of a Japanese monster movie, with a huge Godzillatype beast terrifying a little girl somewhere in the Far East. It then skips forward 25 years, with a startling disconnect, to a New York apartment where irresponsible, chaotic Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her prissy English boyfriend Tim ( Dan Stevens) are not getting on. Gloria is an out- of-work journalist who drinks too much. Tim
Colossal (15) Verdict: Deeply, impenetrably weird ★★✩✩✩
can’t take it any longer and chucks her out. So Gloria returns mournfully to her home town, and there rekindles an old friendship with her seemingly genial childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis).
He has taken over his late father’s old bar and Gloria, in need of a job, goes to work for him.
At this point the film is developing fairly promisingly, if not very originally, into a romantic comedy, led by two appealing performers in Hathaway and Sudeikis. But if there’s one thing Colossal cannot be accused of, it’s a lack of originality.
Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo begins to muddy the waters with a return for the gigantic monster, which has re-emerged and is terrorising the South Korean capital, Seoul.
The beast is crushing buildings and people underfoot, and the TV news is full of it, as you can imagine it would be.
What you can’t imagine, though, is what happens next. Let’s just say that Gloria comes to realise that this creature half-way across the world is in some way an extension of herself.
Hathaway has admitted that her agent’s initial email about the project said: ‘This might be too weird, but it might be the right weird.’
For me it is emphatically the wrong weird, setting challenges for the audience that are impossible to overcome. Is the monster meant in some way to represent Gloria’s alcoholism?
Just when you think you might have cracked it, Vigalondo throws in another rampaging beast, this time a giant robot.
It’s all too bizarre for words, and more significantly, for comprehension. Besides, even if you’re willing to buy the film as an ingenious exploration of the female psyche, there are other insuperable problems. Not least Hathaway’s inability to play a plausible drunk.
Gloria gives an elegant little totter now and again, and can never quite remember what she’s said the night before, from which we are meant to see that she is a raging alcoholic. Yeah, right. If you can’t believe in the small details, there’s no chance of swallowing the bigger picture.