65 (Amazon Prime)
Rating: **
Adam Driver rarely falters in his choice of roles. His gallery of performances have earned him a place among the most adventurous and interesting American actors of modern times. But even Gods slip up once in a while.
65 is the film that Driver can show his children to show them how much Daddy could go wrong while trying to do the right thing.65 directed by Scott Becks and Bryan woods(who wrote the chilling horror franchise A Quiet Place) is a monstrous misfire. It tries to be a futuristic fear journey but ends up being a tiresome display of sci-fi bravura.
The storytelling is constantly pulled down by the what-now conundrum. Not in a good exploratory way.
65 suffers from a true existential crisis. Why was it made in the first place? If it was to be made why did Adam Driver,known to have a canny script sense, fall for this plastic epic where almost every frame creaks with the strain of trying to say something about the value of life, but fails miserably on every level.
It starts with Mills(Adam Driver)sharing a blissful togetherness with his wife Alya(Nika King) and daughter Nevine(Chloe Coleman) at the beach.Experience as moviegoers tells us that any film which begins with the family at the beach is going to pan into a tragedy.
And so it does. Soon Mills’s life refuses to be a boon. He finds himself on another planet with just one girl for company.She can’t speak English.Mills can’t speak whatever language she speaks(pinglish?).
Miraculously Koa(Ariana Greenblatt) is the same age and height as Mills’ daughter so it becomes easier to let them loose in the script for some serious prowling dodging deadly dinosaurs while bonding.
Sadly there is little filial affection visible between the two.
I have always found Adam Driver to be a very cold actor whose personality neither exudes nor invites warmth. He is a solitary reaper. But when thrust into tender company here, he struggles to achieve a semblance of kinship with the kid. But the magical momentum of a spontaneous relationship is completely fugitive as the writer-director duo is more keen on filling the screen with gobbling monsters and slimy reptilian predators than in building any human links.
It all seems like a colossal waste of resources and an unpardonable faux film where the two principal actors have to struggle harder for survival than the characters they play.
