Read more: The Big Sleep – Proof That Plot Doesn’t Matter And then there’s a question mark about how Karen’s son figures into all of this… But there are mysterious suggestions that more is at play, such as Jeremy Strong’s Reid Miller, a salesman who looks to be trading in more than fish equipment as he chases Baker across the island. And for a good hour, that would appear to be the movie. Karen has a simple request for Dill: when Frank comes to the island in two days, she wants her ex to take hubby out fishing on his boat and then leave him for the sharks. If imperfections are found, off comes the belt. While wealthy, she’s in that special kind of hell where her husband asks her to speak in a babydoll voice while “daddy” inspects her body.

Now she’s the trophy wife of a rich sadist called Frank (Jason Clarke).

Her name’s Karen (Hathaway) and she was his high school sweetheart. He’s pretty content with this arrangement until his old flame walks into that bar like an icy silhouette from a different, better 1940s melodrama. Happy to have found a little corner of the world where no one else should be able to locate his home at the bottom of a bottle, he fishes in the day on his boat with an employee named Duke (Djimon Hounsou) and drinks himself into a stupor at night-with a frequent rendezvous in the bed of a neighbor (Diane Lane) at just about any hour. Set on a tropical paradise located vaguely somewhere in the Caribbean, Serenity finds Iraq War vet Baker Dill (McConaughey) more sedated than serene about his life on Plymouth Island. For, yes, Serenity is that strange beast which so spectacularly fails to stick the landing that its kneecaps have been pushed up to eye level. Rather it posits on a “twist” so brazenly misguided that the film’s marketing has wisely elected to hide the truth for fear of sending audiences howling with disbelief out of only the trailers. Well, I love noir and I like derision of its form, so when Steven Knight’s twisty post-modern reinvention leans into tradition, you can almost see a great thriller.Īlmost, because what Serenity is really about-and which I can only hint at in this review without spoiling it-has less to do with smoke filled rooms and hazy regrets made contemptuous flesh. This is the early hook of Serenity that is unapologetically derivative of a legion of noirs from decades past, perhaps most notably Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), only now with Matthew McConaughey as Robert Mitchum and Anne Hathaway as Jane Greer. Surrounded by drinkers, fishers, and every other type of sad sack who’s surrendered on life, she is literally the diamond in the rough-and one with a poisoned edge aimed at the man who can never forget her. She walks into the bar, long blonde hair and large sparkling jewels.

Serenity movie reviews