Fun, inventiveness sit out ‘Chaos Walking’
How is it that director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity,” “Edge of Tomorrow”) comes so late to the YA dystopian future wave that brought us such tediousness as “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “Maze Runner”? “Chaos Walking,” which is based on novels by co-screenwriter Patrick Ness, is set on some distant planet, where human space travelers landed decades earlier and encountered “the Noise.” That phenomenon causes human thoughts to be seen and heard like smoky versions of the “balloons” above the heads of comic book characters. Our protagonist is doting dog owner and expert knife-thrower Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland), whose name you will remember because he mentally repeats it to himself to keep his thoughts from prying eyes and ears. Todd has never seen a woman. All the women travelers, who unlike the men did not get “the Noise,” were killed by the native species known as
the Spackle, according to clearly mad Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen in a big fur coat and cowboy hat) of Prentisstown, where Todd was born and lives with his father and another adult man.
Together, they run a small
farm on the outskirts. Also in the mix is another plainly crazy character named the Preacher (David Oyelowo), whose “thoughts” look like fire and brimstone. After a small spacecraft crash lands in the woods near Todd’s farm, something no one
seems to have seen or heard, Todd spies a figure in tailored orange pants and jacket running from the barn into the woods. He gives chase and finds … a “space girl,” and her name, we will learn, is Viola (Daisy Ridley). Could it be Spider-Man-meets-Rey-Skywalker love at first sight? “Todd Hewitt, Todd Hewitt, Todd Hewitt.”
Can you imagine your thoughts being seen and heard like a constant commentary on whatever you see and think? I would not want my pubescent thoughts (I’m not sure how old knife-wielding Todd is supposed to be; Holland is 24) broadcast in this way to be sure. The most embarrassing thing the film comes up with is a scene in which Todd imagines himself kissing Viola and she sees the thought and is horrified. Like the male elders of Salem, Mayor Prentiss and the Preacher rile the men of Prentisstown up to hunt Todd and the “space girl” down on horseback (horses were aboard the settlers’ spacecraft), at which point “Chaos Walking” becomes a big posse chase movie with a romantic undercurrent.
But it lacks all the fun and inventiveness of Liman’s unforgettable “Bourne” entry, and that includes a lift of the speeder-bike chase in “Return of the Jedi.” Nick Jonas leaves not much impression as the Mayor’s idiot bully son. “Spider-Man” Holland, who can be seen to better effect in the contemporaneous drug drama “Cherry,” is also good here as the hopelessly clueless and frequently shirtless (and in one scene pants-less) Todd, whose mother died when he was a baby and who cannot read her journal. Why, you may wonder, has no one, including his father Ben (Demian Bichir), taught Todd to read? “Space girl” Viola is really from Ridley’s not much Rey, different and the likable Ridley is certainly up to the physical demands of the role. But she and Holland deserve a better film than “Chaos Walking.” (“Chaos Walking” contains pants-less violence, Spider-Man.) profanity and