Would a member of any film review group please post when the New Millennium trope of 90 pound anorexics bumping off evil white men is over? It reached absurd several years ago, and yet Netflix decided a Covid era production (Four characters. Empty location. No real physical contact.) with one more go at the stupid plot is a draw.
Jason Segel, winner of Filmland's Most Awkward Actor for the past fifteen years plays an unnamed thief. He breaks into the empty second, or third, or fifth palatial residence of Jesse Plemons, who always looks like he needs a spa day. Jesse and his significant other eating disorder of a wife (Lily Collins, last scene NOT chowing her way through Paris in "Emily in Paris.") arrive the same day. This is the first of a series of preposterous scenes.
The happy couple haven't been in the home in a year, and yet decide today is the day to drive out to the desert and look at their orange grove.
Plemons plays a combination of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. A tech geek billionaire with an asocial personality. One of his companies might have been the former employer of Segel, who only wants to rob the house and run away.
And that is where the preposterousness accelerates. Segel is a most benign aggrieved criminal, and if there is any sense of malevolence coming from him it must be in another movie. Plemons and Collins could have taken out their B & E guest with one swipe of a wicker dining room chair. Yet they go along with every suggestion he makes while waiting for his payoff money via one of Plemon's zillions of bank accounts.
During an episode with the gardener, who also just happens to show up during the hostage time frame, I took a bathroom break; retrieved a can of sparkling water; and checked on the dog. During that five to ten minute break . . . absolutely nothing happened. Sorta like the rest of the movie.
It all culminates with Lily deciding it would be a good time to have a nervous breakdown with the gardener bleeding on the carpet; Plemons strapped to a wicker, chair bound with at least two flimsy pieces of ethernet cable; and Segel setting a world record for letting down your guard.
In a finale worthy of the word, "STUPID," Lily disappears into the desert with no phone, no water, and no functioning cerebral cortex.
Again, I beg anyone with an interest in film. Please send me a note when Hollywood decides the distaff sex needs a few roles other than those dependent upon pretense, social justice, and laws of physics denial.
Netflix, should you like this sorta thing.
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