Last year, I remember reading this wild report about a film called Serenity starring Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey that received such shit early reviews, that distributors abandoned plans to promote it ahead of its release.
Deadline reported at that time that the marketing campaign for the thriller flick was shit-canned at the last minute and as a result, the movie bombed ‘cos, well, no one bloody knew about it, other than the critics who panned it.
Apparently the pair were all set to depart on the press junket, including talk show appearances and interviews, when they discovered the night before that the planned promotional spend had fallen through.
Hathaway later penned a now-infamous Instagram caption, calling out the whole incident. Read it here:
After the movie was eventually released, and watched by an embarrassing number of people, both the film’s plot and its plot-twist became iconic… iconically bad.
News outlets and social media critics alike were extremely vocal about their disdain for the plot twist, such as the following scathing review from Vanity Fair:
Sure, I’m an Entertainment Editor and it’s my job to review films, good or bad, but it’s my contention that life is too short to sit through poorly made films that no one cares about and since there was no media screening or Australia-based promo for the film, I didn’t bother plonking down my hard-earned dollarydoos and wasting an evening to go see it.
But when it recently landed on local streaming service Stan, I figured, well, now’s as good a time as ever to see what all the shade was about and honestly, I don’t get it. I thought that plot twist was BRILLIANT.
First have a read of the synopsis, then I’ll delve into the plot twist (BTW now would be the time to exit if you wish to see the film and not have it ruined):
A fishing boat captain juggles facing his mysterious past and finding himself ensnared in a reality where nothing is what it seems.
It’s one of those movies where you’re watching it the whole time, just waiting for the plot twist to pop out and when it finally did, let me tell you, I was not disappointed.
In case you’re still confused about what the hell happened, let me break it down for you.
The plot of Serenity isn’t about Baker (McConaughey) trying to catch a big fish, it’s not about his ex-wife Karen (Hathaway) coming back into his life, and it’s not even about her asking him to kill her abusive ex-husband Frank (Jason Clarke) for $10 mill.
It’s about Baker’s son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh) being so upset about his situation that he’s created a fictional video game where his dad is still around.
So throughout the film, we see him weighing up whether he should change the game from being about fishing, to being about killing her mum’s abusive new partner, an act that reflects Patrick’s real-world desire.
I agree that it’s an absolutely batshit twist, and yes, it’s very weird that Patrick, as the game’s creator, has scenes where the avatar for his father (who IRL died heroically in the Iraq War) has sex for money with an attractive older woman (Diane Lane) on the island.
But the plot twist of reprogramming a video game to mimic his dad who he misses is, frankly, genius, and something I’ve never seen before.
I remember I sat there the whole time, waiting for the twist to be revealed, and I kept saying, ‘If the twist is that they’re all dead or this was all a dream, I’ll be furious.’ But it wasn’t a cliche. It was something unique and brilliantly done, IMO.
Sure, it’s not Oscar-worthy stuff, but I don’t think it deserved all the hatred it copped and it most definitely did NOT deserve to have the promotion abandoned. They’ve done more for less, if ya know what I mean.
Anyway, catch the trailer below and go forth and give it a watch on Stan. It’s not a waste of time, I promise.
