This is the new movie starring Mickey Rourke (off his comeback with The Wrestler) and Bill Murray and Megan Fox. The two big questions seem to be: can she act and does she get naked? So, yes, she can act (although not really in this movie because they don't give her anything to do) and no, she does not get naked, although there are a few scenes where it would make sense for her to be naked so I'm guessing in the script she was supposed to get naked, but then got the director to change it.
Now that that crap is out of the way, from the rest of the this I'll actually talk about the movie.
The story: Nate (Rourke) slept with a powerful man's wife (Happy, played by Murray) who has his goons drive him out into the desert to kill him. But he is saved and then wanders to a carnival where a winged woman (Fox) is on display. He takes her away from there and they grow close, but really he wants to use her to pay back Happy so he won't get killed. Except he wants to be with her too. But then Happy shows up and tells her how Nate was using her and now she goes with Happy. Of course, Nate is desperate to get her back and break her free of Nate's clutches...
Was it good?
No.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
The movie does everything bad that LOST IN TRANSLATION got right -- an older man's loneliness, bonding with a young girl who is also alone, etc. Except LiT did a great job of explaining why the man felt lost -- away from his family, in a strange country, doing a job he doesn't really like, feeling disconnected from his family -- while this movie doesn't. And they avoided an overt romance that most people would have rolled their eyes at (which this movie doesn't). Here, you are just supposed to look at Rourke and get that he is lost. He's a musician, but that seems to be more just a trinket than anything else (maybe it's to help explain why Fox falls for him...girls do love musicians). He slept with some other guy's wife. He's just this mopey thing, really. Even when he starts to fall for the winged girl...well, even with wings it's still Megan Fox. And he is still using her, which again is kind of a scumbag move.
It's a movie that doesn't really say or do anything. It's for people that feel mopey and ugly and with they were beautiful and, oh, isn't the world cruel, but that don't want to do anything about it, they just want to be mopey and have other people tell them everything is okay. For them, this movie might be great. For everyone else, it's total crap. And the ending will just piss you off even more. Seriously, Ambrose Bierce did it in 1890. Find a new ending already.
One last thing. All the actors are fine. Yes, even Megan Fox, although honestly she doesn't have much to do but stare into Mickey Rourke's eyes and occassionally stand with her hands covering her breasts. The fault is entirely the writer/director -- Mitch Glazer -- who wrote a self-indulgent script, directed it poorly (from a visual standpoint), had bad F/X for the wings which never look real, and included that stupid ending which makes you feel like the whole thing was a waste of time. It's like he was trying to do a cross between WINGS OF DESIRE and "The Very Old Man with Enourmous Wings" but didn't actually know how/why those stories worked and just took all the bad, sappy stuff and stitched it together.
Needless to say...and I don't like saying this because I'm a huge Bill Murray fan...
**** AVOID ****
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