PLOT: A lawyer (Paul Rudd) and his daughter (Jenna Ortega) accidentally hit and kill a unicorn on the way to spend the weekend with his clients, a wealthy big-pharma family with a dying patriarch (Richard E. Grant). Once the family realizes the unicorn possesses healing powers, they try to use its body to their own illicit ends, only to discover these mythical creatures are far more dangerous than mythic lore suggests.
REVIEW: Death of a Unicorn has a lot more unicorn-based carnage than I expected. Going into the film, I told myself that if I saw at least one person impaled by a unicorn horn, I’d be happy, but I didn’t realize the movie was a lot more ambitious in that regard. People do get impaled, but they also get ripped to pieces, split in half, crushed under hoofs and much gorier.
While I definitely enjoyed watching the unicorns have their day of vengeance (how could I not?), Death of a Unicorn still ultimately fell flat for me. It aspires to be satire, with the wealthy Leopold family clearly modelled on the Sacklers, but the movie falls flat in that regard, shockingly laugh-free and toothless.
Paul Rudd plays to type as the everyman hero, being a lawyer who’s willing to sell out his scruples to provide for his daughter, with him being a single father who raised her alone after the death of his wife. In classic morality tale fashion, this ambition has spoiled his relationship with Jenna Ortega’s Ridley, who’s now an art history major at college and finds her father a bore. Rudd always manages to hold on to an audience’s sympathy, and of everyone, it’s him and Ortega that come off the best, as they’re the only ones not playing caricatures.
Indeed, the depiction of the Leopold clan fell flat, and they’re all so one-note, lacking any kind of pathos. There’s Richard E. Grant as Odell, the dying patriarch, and Tea Leoni as his younger trophy wife, Belinda. Much of the conflict revolves around Will Poulter as Shepard, the coked-up family scion, who’s as close as the movie comes to a villain, with us meant to at least partially root for the unicorns as they start picking off members of the Shepard household. Of everyone, the only cast member who really registers meaningfully is Barry’s Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the family butler.
One has to give writer-director Alex Scharfman credit for ambition, with this clearly meant to be something akin to Succession meets Jurassic Park (Jurassic Unicorn?), but it’s not clever enough to work. That said, Scharfman does have a handle on the carnage aspect, and he might be one of those indie guys who manages to come into his own as a franchise director, as the sensibility is there. The CGI for the unicorns is never entirely convincing, but I believe they are meant to be at least somewhat cartoony, while Dan Romer and Giosuè Greco score playfully mixes fantasy-style themes, with more John Carpenter-esque synth work (the director was at one point attached to score the film).
While not painful to watch, Death of a Unicorn is the second large-canvas A24 genre movie in a row to fall flat (following Opus). One has to give them credit for allowing untested directors to take big swings, and as a concept, I’m sure Death of a Unicorn had promise. While the movie has its moments, it doesn’t come together as a whole and feels ultimately forgettable.
The post Death of a Unicorn (SXSW) Review: Falls flat as a satire but has some fun unicorn carnage appeared first on JoBlo.
No comments:
Post a Comment