South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Promising first half gives way to lame slasher-film territory
Most movies hit one note, or sell a single idea, and stick to the sales pitch.
“The Rental” is different. It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.
The script comes from Franco and producer Joe Swanberg. The story’s a tale of two wormy, competitive brothers. Charlie (Dan Stevens) has just scored some long-awaited seed money for a tech startup. His business partner, photographed in the first scene to suggest a close intimacy, is Mina (Sheila Vand), who’s dating Charlie’s volatile Lyftdriver brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White).
Charlie’s wife (Alison Brie) completes the foursome, and when Charlie inquires online about a stunning oceanside vacation rental, two things are clear. One: It’s too good to be true, even at a pretty steep price. And two: The stage is set for a getaway fraught with drink, infidelity, drugs, hot-tubbing, unwanted surveillance and a menacing, drawling, insinuatingly racist caretaker (Toby Huss) who lives just up the road and who doesn’t like the look, or the ethnicity, of Mina.
What works in “The Rental” — chiefly, Franco’s camera sense, and/or his partnership with the cinematographer, Christian Sprenger — reminds us that most problems with movies tend to happen long before filming begins. As in so many Swanberg projects, “The Rental” gets by for a while on straightforward sexual suspense:
Alison Brie completes the foursome in “The Rental.”
MPAA rating: R (for violence, language throughout, drug use and some sexuality)
Running time: 1:28
Now playing: On various VOD streaming platforms.
When will the cheating start? It’s a surefire way to keep an audience watching.
The downside with a lot of Swanberg’s scripts remains the barely examined, mansplain-y tedium of the male characters, coupled with the vaguely shrill, gently patronized quality of the female characters. Once the hammers come out and the corpses commence, you can almost hear the writers laughing to themselves:
Yeah, well, stupid, but the violence helped secure the funding, so
...
On the other hand, Franco’s direction helps the early scenes breathe a little and establishes some effective, offhanded interplay among sharp-witted actors. Who knows? Maybe “good for a while” is a good enough review for this particular summer. I like that “The Rental” is opening at 250-plus venues, including some driveins, around the country this weekend, in tandem with the usual VOD streaming launch.
Or you can stream it at home. Your standards are lower there, but we’ll all have to get used to that.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.