This movie would not end. It just kept going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I began to wish that my house would catch fire so I would have an excuse to stop watching it.
This interminable tale starts out with John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons. Chris (Jaime Bell) is a teenage delinquent with a crush on a neighbor girl. Tim (Devon Alan) is the brainy kid brother with a 1970s era Bee Gees haircut who makes himself sick by eating any appalling garbage he can get his hands on. They live out in the sticks and don't interact much with the rest of the world. Then John's brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up. Deel has gotten out of prison and is looking for work. John asks him to stay and help look after his boys. Deel agrees, but the reason he's really there is to find the old coins their father had. He finds the coins, things go terribly wrong and the rest of the movie involves Chris, Tim and Deel wandering aimlessly and pointlessly through the countryside in one of the most boring stretches of film I've ever seen or even imagined.
There are so many scenes in Undertow that are so dumb and so purposeless they could only exist to stretch this story out to legitimate movie-length. We get to watch John Munn eat cake! We get to see him smoke a pipe! We get to listen to Tim prattle on about chiggers! We observe Chris and Tim performing chores for a black couple! And we also get to experience the slowest speed chase in the history of anyone chasing anybody! I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the second half of this film is useless crud. It serves no function within the story and it has no greater thematic or emotional significance for the audience.
Compounding the awesome lack of meaning and direction in this story is that these characters talk about their emotions like they're guests on the Dr. Phil show. These people are portrayed as unsophisticated country folk, yet they speak as though they've been in therapy since they were born. There is nothing in this story that is left under the surface. Every last, little, possible nuance or subtlety is just splayed out in front of the audience, as though the filmmakers were worried that this film might be a bit too smart for people. It ain't.
Josh Lucas is the only actor who manages to give an even halfway decent performance, and he's stuck with a character who stops making sense halfway through the film. Mulroney and his two young co-stars are just stiffs. Though to be fair, it's not like the story is asking them for more and they fail to deliver. The characters are just blocks of wood, so I suppose their uninspired work may have been a case of good acting in crappy roles.
Finally, there's a lot of inexplicably arty direction going on here. Something will happen and that image will be repeated again and again. The film will flash to negative for a second or the image will freeze while we still hear people talking. Slow motion is used, not for some important moment in the story, but for a homeless chick walking. That's all she was doing. Walking. And they put her in slow-mo! None of these fancy tricks mean anything to the story or to how the audience is supposed to perceive it. I think the director simply thought they looked really cool. He was wrong.
Undertow starts out like it's a "family coming together" movie, runs into a big moment of melodrama and then mutates into this ponderous, tiring, idiotic drool. I can understand why someone may have thought the first half of this film was worth making. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what went wrong with the second half.
This interminable tale starts out with John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons. Chris (Jaime Bell) is a teenage delinquent with a crush on a neighbor girl. Tim (Devon Alan) is the brainy kid brother with a 1970s era Bee Gees haircut who makes himself sick by eating any appalling garbage he can get his hands on. They live out in the sticks and don't interact much with the rest of the world. Then John's brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up. Deel has gotten out of prison and is looking for work. John asks him to stay and help look after his boys. Deel agrees, but the reason he's really there is to find the old coins their father had. He finds the coins, things go terribly wrong and the rest of the movie involves Chris, Tim and Deel wandering aimlessly and pointlessly through the countryside in one of the most boring stretches of film I've ever seen or even imagined.
There are so many scenes in Undertow that are so dumb and so purposeless they could only exist to stretch this story out to legitimate movie-length. We get to watch John Munn eat cake! We get to see him smoke a pipe! We get to listen to Tim prattle on about chiggers! We observe Chris and Tim performing chores for a black couple! And we also get to experience the slowest speed chase in the history of anyone chasing anybody! I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the second half of this film is useless crud. It serves no function within the story and it has no greater thematic or emotional significance for the audience.
Compounding the awesome lack of meaning and direction in this story is that these characters talk about their emotions like they're guests on the Dr. Phil show. These people are portrayed as unsophisticated country folk, yet they speak as though they've been in therapy since they were born. There is nothing in this story that is left under the surface. Every last, little, possible nuance or subtlety is just splayed out in front of the audience, as though the filmmakers were worried that this film might be a bit too smart for people. It ain't.
Josh Lucas is the only actor who manages to give an even halfway decent performance, and he's stuck with a character who stops making sense halfway through the film. Mulroney and his two young co-stars are just stiffs. Though to be fair, it's not like the story is asking them for more and they fail to deliver. The characters are just blocks of wood, so I suppose their uninspired work may have been a case of good acting in crappy roles.
Finally, there's a lot of inexplicably arty direction going on here. Something will happen and that image will be repeated again and again. The film will flash to negative for a second or the image will freeze while we still hear people talking. Slow motion is used, not for some important moment in the story, but for a homeless chick walking. That's all she was doing. Walking. And they put her in slow-mo! None of these fancy tricks mean anything to the story or to how the audience is supposed to perceive it. I think the director simply thought they looked really cool. He was wrong.
Undertow starts out like it's a "family coming together" movie, runs into a big moment of melodrama and then mutates into this ponderous, tiring, idiotic drool. I can understand why someone may have thought the first half of this film was worth making. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what went wrong with the second half.