Ensnared in a net of cleverness
There are thrillers that hold on to their twists under lock and key, and then there’s Serenity, a torrid noir enigma so in love with its underlying, insane concept that it simply can’t wait to tip you off. Approaching it in spoiler-free fashion is hardly worth the trouble, since the movie spoils itself, littering its own path with increasingly ridiculous clues. Every time it springs a moment of “wait, what?” – which is constantly – you’re being primed, in theory, for the humdinger gimmick writerdirector Steven Knight (Taboo, Peaky
Blinders, Locke) has up his sleeve. The film escapes Knight’s control almost from minute one, so much so that it starts to feel like a crossword puzzle for which they’ve accidentally supplied yesterday’s grid. Matthew Mcconaughey gives a nonsensically overripe performance as one Baker Dill, the captain of a fishing boat who’s obsessed with catching a particular giant tuna – “the tuna in my head” he calls it – and will drop everything to try to snare it. It has a name (“Justice”) and stands for a whole lot more than months’ worth of juicy carpaccio.
Feckless about his income on a tropical backwater called Plymouth Island, he’s paid for sex by a bored local (Diane Lane) and lives in a windowless shipping container by the sea. He’s also beset by weird visions, seemingly about a son in a former life: one early peak of “what-on-earth?” is a sequence with Mcconaughey swimming nude off a rocky headland and encountering a nude adolescent boy: the film’s fondness for having its lead sweat buckets and wander around in the buff adds little but camp value to its deranged imaginings.
Then arrives Karen (Anne Hathaway), Dill’s sultry ex-wife, with an all-white wardrobe and a proposal lifted from Body Heat and Double Indemnity. She wants her current husband, a boorish sadist played by Jason Clarke, tipped overboard as fish food, for which she’s willing to pay Dill a princely $10 million.
The film’s trail of breadcrumbs is scattered around as if by M Night Shyamalan parodying a Christopher Nolan remake of The Truman Show. Little wonder that Mcconaughey is reduced to growling his hopeless dialogue or occasionally just barking at the sky, in the kind of go-for-broke bad performance that makes you beg for the subtleties of Nicolas Cage. As trash pleasures go, Serenity’s too ploddingly stretched and lacking in plot curlicues to reach nirvana, but it’s capable of making a whole audience giggle at its wonderfully pretentious gracenotes – just wait for the relevance of a lighthouse emitting binary code, or a black brogue floating in the surf. And every cut back to Mcconaughey, looking like the victim of an epic April Fool’s prank.