One of the earliest shots in Serenity is of a man in a finely tailored suit standing on a beach holding a briefcase. He watches a fishing boat pull into harbour and then wades through the shallow water to get to it. It’s the kind of striking image that conjures memories of Lost, and this movie is quite a bit like Lost: a mess of plot points and character motivations that comes to no satisfactory end, but with a twist more outlandish and bizarre than even that show could ever conceive.
Talking about Serenity in a standard review is a tough task because so much of what makes this movie from writer-director Steven Knight so utterly baffling is in elaborate plot details and spoiler elements. To get to the meat of this movies’ severe structural and tonal problems requires discussing it in more depth than this type of short-form critique allows. But I especially want to avoid spoilers for this movie because I think people should absolutely see it. It is not going to be in any way what you expect and I’ll be surprised if 2019 yields a better more glorious misfire of a movie than Serenity! That being said, I may spoil some minor details, it’s just unavoidable.
Baker Dill (Matthew McConnaughey) is a fisherman on the remote Plymouth Island whose day-to-day life consists of taking tourists out on his boat the Serenity, and his quest to catch a giant tuna nicknamed “Justice”. One day he’s approached by his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) from whom he’s been estranged and has a son, with a proposition: that he take her abusive husband Frank (Jason Clarke) out on the water and murder him. As he contemplates this he begins to notice strange things on the island that coincided with the arrival of Karen and Frank.
That premise sounds corny and it is, but it also has shades of neo-noir to it which makes it feel like an interesting throwback to something like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. Even the cast perform it in slightly outdated, over-the-top ways that hearken back to that style of film. But where those movies (the good ones at least) had complexities to their characters and plots that kept you interested, Serenity has only the shadow of that, its’ genuine attempts to be complex coming off as absurd, such as the relationship Baker has with his son and everything having to do with the aforementioned strange man on the beach (Jeremy Strong). It doesn’t help that this is a terribly written script even by film noir standards, little of the dialogue feeling organic and the characterization even less so. The movie really goes the extra mile in depicting Frank in as awful a light of possible, which is kind of intentional, but still lazy. And Baker is pretty poorly defined as well, even with more development than anyone else, merely going from a lesser Charlie Allnut/Quint type character to a one-dimensional paranoid lunatic who’s fun to watch but is in no way interesting.
That being said, I do believe the cast is trying their best with the material. Matthew McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway are not at fault with any of this, because I can’t see anyone making anything good out of this writing and direction. Diane Lane and Djimon Hounsou also make appearances that are a little sad to witness but are likewise giving their best effort. And it is that effort that makes a difference. The cast genuinely is trying to take this movie seriously, and ultimately it makes the experience of watching it all the more astounding.
Because the writing and the acting isn’t the movies’ weirdest quality. There’s a twist in Serenity. An absolutely bonkers twist -one that may even be more bizarre than the most eccentric of Shyamalan movies. You might be able to catch on to it after a bit, though you’ll think, ‘no, that CAN’T be it’; but oh, yes it is! And when it is revealed it’s mesmerizing to watch the movie deal with it. In a way it tries to excuse the poor writing and character through some half-sensible logic (it doesn’t); and even then it continues to gob-smack you. In light of the twist, certain aspects of the movie, a handful of scenes, become way more troubling or ill-thought through. I’m sure the movie didn’t intend to be Freudian for example, but it becomes an interpretable lens impossible to avoid. There are some themes tied into the twist as well and an horrible message that seemingly attempts to justify homicide. In all of it, the film is clearly reaching for some big ideas but is completely bogged down by the radical turn its story takes, that none of it has any meaning.
The end result is that Serenity is an incompetent mess, but one that at times might seem secretly genius as an exercise in surreality and expectation subversion for its own sake. It’s the kind of film made for a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 riff, and just as fun with the right group of friends. This might not be that good a review, as I’ve kept it as intentionally vague as possible. I went in with no expectations at all, not even knowing its base premise, and was blown away by the unpredictable depths of its awfulness. If so-bad-its-good movies are your jam, Serenity is not to be missed!
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