Jessie Buckleys latest is one of the worst movies…
film review
THE BRIDE
ZERO STARS. Running time: 127 minutes. Rated R (strong/bloody violent content, inappropriate content/nudity and language). In theaters March 6.
Leave her at the altar!
She is “The Bride!,” one of the absolute worst movies I’ve had the displeasure of watching in this job.
It’s a struck-by-lightning shocker to see a big Hollywood studio’s riff on a story as outdated and overexplored as “Frankenstein” — starring an Oscar winner and two nominees, no less — be so slathered in ineptitude.
Yet, only seconds in, I regretted leaving my trusty torch and pitchfork at home.
“Knock, knock,” goes the first line in writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s confounding script, which was maybe scribbled down at 4 a.m. in a dream journal. It’s spoken by Jessie Buckley, who’s up for Best Actress in 11 days.
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“Who’s there?” replies the same deranged girl, apparently speaking to herself.
“It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of ‘Frankenstein.’”
A sense of paralyzing dread crept in. There is another two hours and 5 minutes of this?!
Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley star in director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s horrible riff on “Frankenstein,” “The Bride.” AP
Shelley, who died in 1851, is trapped in a darkish shadowy limbo between the world and the afterlife. There, she rambles in sing-songy, literary gibberish with the overzealousness of a haunted home worker on payday.
To live on, Mary Mary Quite Unscary decides to spiritually possess a mobster’s girlfriend named Ida (also Buckley) in Thirties Chicago. Oh, it will get worse and worse.
After Ida has a foul-mouthed, supernatural outburst at a restaurant, a man pushes her down the stairs and kills her. For now, anyway.
Because, then, the well-known horror creature (Christian Bale) arrives in the Windy City, still with grotesque stitches all over his face and neck, even though he’s more than a century outdated. Bale, in another foolish transformation, has the breathy voice of the Elephant Man, but pervier, like Joseph Merrick is ogling a stripper.
The monster, who goes by Frankenstein (Bale), arrives in Chicago wanting for a girlfriend. AP
Chicago has the Cubs, Lake Michigan and its very own resident mad scientist named Dr. Euphronious, performed by Annette Bening, who’s as stiff as the corpses her character goals of reanimating. In Chi-Town, the hulk orders up some 6-foot-deep dish.
“I’m looking for an intercourse,” the attractive monster who goes by Frankenstein says to her.
“Is this about sex, Frank?” she asks.
Yup. He longs to expertise the entire “garden of pleasures” and get pleasure from a “relationship.”
Sold, the doc pumps high-voltage electrical energy into Ida’s useless physique, and Frankenstein finally will get his coveted bride.
The Bride (Buckley) is possessed by the spirit of the late Mary Shelley. AP
For some inexplicable purpose, Mary continues to inhabit Ida, and Buckley turns into Jekyll and Bride, switching erratically between an amped-up British accent and a Midwest flapper’s yap. The split-personality shtick makes zero sense and I couldn’t observe something she said.
So far, Gyllenhaal’s movie has slumped in a fog of laughless confusion as it strains to be fashionable while having no distinctive sense of model.
Its dirty-clown aesthetic is “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Its execution is “Joker: Folie à Deux.”
Now comes the time to exhume a feminist twist from the graveyard.
The movie shifts into “Bonnie and Bride.” Whenever terrible males mistaken Bride, the duo brutally murders them.
The movie’s aesthetic is “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Its execution is Joker: Folie à Deux.” AP
Their ZzzzZzzzzZzzz crime spree begins outdoors a nightclub where a thug tries to rape her. Angry Frankenstein “curbs” him, which means he places the jerk’s head on the sidewalk and crushes his cranium with his foot.
On the run, they flee the cops on a practice to New York City, where Frank stalks a Fred Astaire-like Hollywood star named Ronnie Reed (Maggie’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal).
Because he’s fanatically obsessed with Ronnie’s black-and-white musical movies, which all look faux, there is a pointless, inappropriateized company dance quantity to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” not so a lot nodding to Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” as defiling it.
As their drawn-out, uninteresting antics go on, Frank and Bride are pursued by two cliched detectives — Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz). You received’t be stunned to be taught that she’s the real brains behind the partnership, but Jake will get all the credit.
The film’s apparent message — “I’m not the Bride of anybody!” — is foghorn loud yet utterly ineffective, a la “Kids, don’t go subway surfing.”
Frankenstein is obsessed with a Hollywood star named Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). AP
Bale and Buckley’s performing is dedicated, oh yes. To a fault. Never do you imagine them in these poorly constructed roles or sympathize with their us-against-the-world plight.
Buckley particularly needed to be reined in. She introduced me back to her efficiency as Sally Bowles in London’s West End manufacturing of “Cabaret.” When she will’t suppose of anything to do, she throws her head back and laughs maniacally.
Bale blends Batman and Gollum.
The duo is chased by a pair of detectives, Jake (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna (Penélope Cruz). AP
Gyllenhaal’s 2021 directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” which starred Buckley and Olivia Colman, was improbable and unsettling — a good notice to start on.
After the repellent sludge that is “The Bride!,” she must carry her talent for simple, psychological storytelling back from the useless.
The end credit music right here, I child you not, is “Monster Mash.” The capper on this monster mush.
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