22
« Last post by Kaos on March 18, 2025, 08:00:45 AM »
Longleg
Not what I expected. Extremely strange movie.
Maika Monroe proving she can do dour, sour, and mopey (see also Watchers, It Follows .. might just be the natural state of her face?), Nicholas Cage proving he can do really bad makeup (Dad of Mask?), Kiernan Shipka proving she can look ugly (which is a little surprising), Alicia Witt proving maybe she's just a D-Girl after all (right Chrissy? What did we ever see in her?), and Blair Underwood proving he looks pretty good for a 60 year old and probably should have had a better career (where has Jonathan Rollins been since L.A. Law, anyway?).
Weird story about a serial killer who uses props to get others to do his dirty work, the people who help, and the motivation behind it. Not sure why the name 'Longleg' was chosen, had some questions about the herky-jerky camera choices, had some questions about some really problematic directorial decisions - not the least of which was the back-and-forth-in-time trope.
Without giving away too much - in case you watch it - here are a few from the first few minutes that bugged me.
Dour face goes on a door knocking "manhunt" with a randomly assigned FBI partner (and you knew he was expendable like a Star Trek red shirt almost instantly). She intuits where the bad guy is, he gets his face blown off after knocking at the door, and she..... backs up against the flimsy window of the apartment. This isn't back to the wall stuff, the bad guy could have shot right through the window into her head and ended the film in that instant. She doesn't "call it in" despite moments earlier saying they should call it in, instead she goes into the house to search for the guy, only to find a Dexterish panapoly of plastic sheeting.
Then she goes back to the agency (hello Mr. Clinton) and is questioned by her boss about how she knew the bad guy was in that specific apartment. BASED ON WHAT? The red-shirt partner eschewed "calling it in." Who was aware that she "knew which apartment" other than her? What did she do, go back and say "yeah, I knew which one he was in, so...." and that was just accepted at face value?
I had a lot of problems with the script and the directoral direction. A LOT of problems.
It's a low budget film (does Cage do anything else these days) and it has a moment or two, but overall.... just didn't care for it. It was slow, it was bleak, it made little sense at times, and it left me flat.
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