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The Return
The past never dies. It bores.
2006
Review: November 21, 2006
Director: Asif Kapadia
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Peter O’Brien, Adam Scott, Kate Beahan, Sam Shepard
No! It’s slow enough as it is.
THE SETUP:
Woman is haunted by visions and bullshit.
DISCUSSION:
So I was pretty keen to see Casino Royale, and though I knew it would be taking a chance showing up with no reserved ticket on the Sunday after it opened, I tried anyway. It was not sold out when I arrived, but all of the ticket kiosks except three were not working, so there were lines from the ticket counter to 50 yards back and out the door, and I decided to just skip the heartache. Good thing I did, as by the time I gave up, my showing was sold out.
So I look at the other giant multiplex across the street from the giant multiplex I was in. There’s not a thing there I want to see, but I see that The Return is playing in 20 minutes and I like me some Sarah Michelle Gellar [SMG], and I figured, “How bad could it be?” Well, I’m here to tell you…
Since I was early I was treated to the full inanity of the “First Look” series, which are considered editorial pieces because they break up a movie trailer with snippets of [moronic] interviews. What I love about these things is how they break from the commercial to show you a commercial [often the same movie trailer but without interviews], as though there is some perceptible difference. I have to admire lines like “When we come back, Sony Pictures takes you inside the American dream.” WHAT does that mean? WHO allowed themselves to write something so bland and devoid of any relation to reality? Then the advertorial comes back on for some show in which one of the interview subjects [of this penetrating documentary] says the show is “Like Sex and the City meets Friends, but with different friends in a different city.” So you are ADMITTING that your new show is a bald-faced rip-off and it’s just the same old thing with a new coat of paint?
I have more, but I suspect you’re eager to start hearing about The Return, although that would be a mistake. Okay, so some girl we know is going to turn out to be SMG is taken to the “fun fair” by her dad, Sam Shepard [totally slumming, as usual]. She sees this menacing car, and hides because she thinks some creepy guy is after her. She breaks a bottle and cuts her own leg, then daddy rescues her. Flash forward until she is played by SMG.
She now sells insurance or trucking services or Amway products or something, and makes a pitch to travel to Texas to attempt to rein in this really difficult client. Her boss says “I thought Texas was off limits for you,” but she says she’ll be fine. Then this other guy [the sleazoid teacher from one episode of first-season Veronica Mars] is all pissed that she’s getting to go, and virtually attacks her in the hallway. This guy is played by Adam Scott, who is kind of the bargain-basement Ashton Kutcher, when for some reason you WANT Ashton Kutcher, but can’t afford the $5.75 it would take to get him.
So she drives to Texas and starts having car radio trouble, it just keeps playing a snippet of Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams.” Then she gets out of the car and has a vision of a car accident in front of her, then she falls asleep in the field. She wakes up in the morning and runs off to her big meeting. “Hi, I’m Joanna, I just slept in a field. How are you?” By the way, earlier we have found out that SMG has “never been the same since that car accident,” which happened when she was eleven.
So she gets the big account, then meets up with her friend [Kate Beahan from the Neil LaBute Wicker Man], and they go clubbin’, where SMG starts having more visions, so obviously the answer is to go straight out onto the dance floor. She has a vision she’s going into this road house where she sees the mysterious scary guy [who looks a bit like her father], then goes into the phone booth and cuts her arm. She wakes up in the bathroom at the club, having cut herself. By the way, SMG carries a switchblade with her at all times. That's self-mutilation on the go!
Then she goes to visit her dad, and tells her that her acting weird when young was a cry for help. We never find out what happened to her mother. Between all the self-mutilation and sexy guys that look like daddy, I thought we were in for some serious psychosexual shenanigans but no go. Then she finds the real road house like the one in her dream, and, after securing a room in a hotel whose lobby apparently doubles as a slaughterhouse [there is a haunch of beef hung over the seat the landlady just got up from], she goes to the road house that night.
There Mr. Bargain-Ashton assaults her [he came all that way just cause he’s pissed?] and gets beaten up by mysterious stranger #3, who looks a lot like the other one, who looks like her dad.
This is Terry Stahl, who someone says “should have been locked up a long time ago.” SMG goes to find him the next day, blah, blah, blah, more visions, more weirdness, etc. By this time people in my audience of about 30 were streaming at regular intervals out of the theater, and the guy behind me began this series of long, extravagant yawns. The movie keeps going on, and on, with a vision and a jump shock every few minutes to spice things up, and eventually you realize that ALL that is happening are jump shocks. The story is barely being advanced at all, and what new information is delivered only starts to form a picture that looks pretty darn banal.
SPOILERS > > >
So we start to realize that there’s some connection between Terry’s dead wife, who looked a bit like SMG, and SMG, and since you know there was a car accident that predated SMG’s acting weird, it’s not long before you figure that Terry’s wife was in the other car and there was some sort of reincarnation thing where her spirit jumped into SMG, and this is exactly what it turns out to be. Thing is, this revelation IS the climax of the movie—it’s one of those ‘now that the truth is out, we can put our personal demons to bed’ kind of things—and that is IT. The end. So you’re just sitting there watching the film grind along toward that conclusion, and seeing how they waste time and protract everything in order to get to a normal running time.
< < < SPOILERS END
This is really 20 minutes of story stretched out into 90 [or really, 85] minutes of movie. I usually don’t believe critics or audiences when they say that something is boring, because that usually means that it doesn’t feature an axe-to-face scene every three minutes, but this shit is BORING. And by that I mean that NOTHING is happening in the story or character. It’s just trying to pad the thing out with senseless visions and other diversions [the co-worker who ends up having NOTHING to do with ANYTHING] until it’s finally time to be over. You know that 50-horror-movies-for-$20 set I keep talking about? In 20 years, THIS movie will be on one of those things… the absolute detritus of the movie industry.
It’s too bad that this gets a theatrical release because it has a star while something infinitely more worthwhile like The Woods or the Tobe Hooper Toolbox Murders goes straight to video. And WHAT THE FUCK is SMG thinking? Is she really so starved for parts that she has to take things like this? Come now, she’s got to have better choices. Do a romantic comedy or something. Sarah, I will WRITE you a better script than this. Maybe she’s taken the reins from Sandra Bullock in the actresses-you-want-to-like-but-they-keep-doing-horrible-movies contest.
And truth be known, SMG is NOT very good in this. She makes no attempt to be another person, she’s just SMG with dark hair in ‘troubled’ mode. We know from the episode of Buffy in which she switched bodies with Faith that she can do it… she just needs to think of someone other than herself when she reads a script and try to be that person.
I’m a little shocked to go on IMDb and find about half the readers really like this film… I thought it would be a universal hate-fest. I can see how if all you watch is the remake of Pulse or House of Wax or The Fog you might find this a fascinating, character-driven piece, but if you’ve seen a decent movie anywhere at any time during your life I would guess that you’d be bored stiff. I still can’t get over that this movie could be quite THIS bad. Between the Casino Royale debacle and then torture of the ‘First Look’ series, the movie, and the shitty meal I had afterward, my real mistake was in leaving the house at all.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
For no reason. If you want to see SMG, watch your favorite Buffy episodes again.
