Move Review: Hangman

I rented Karl Urban's latest flick, Hangman, from Amazon today. After the scathing reviews that attacked everything from the acting to the writing to the shape of Karl Urban's nose(no, really), I was expecting a noxious mess of tired cliches, wooden acting, and trite writing.

Well, it was all of those things, and yet, it wasn't as bad as most reviews insist. We live in an age of hyperbolic exaggeration, where nothing is simply serviceable or mediocre. It's either the WORST EVER, OMG, or THE BEST EVER, ALL THE AWARDS. If you doubt this, just look at the paroxysmic histrionics from both sides of The Last Jedi fandom. Those who hate it swear that Rian Johnson is a soulless apostate who has murdered their childhoods by assassinating the character of Luke Skywalker, and who has shat, shat, I tell you on the holy Star Wars legacy. Those who love it, by contrast, declare it might be one of the best Star Wars movies in the canon, and extol the progressive virtues of its casting and storytelling. There is no middle ground, no place for enjoyment without veneration or disappointment sans vitriol.

Hangman is no The Last Jedi. It's a piddling potboiler with a bland, hackneyed script and dialogue that sounds like it was written by a fifteen-year-old trying his hand at the deft psychological thriller, armed with only every season of NYPD Blue, Blue Bloods, and Serpico as his guideline. Poor Karl spends most of his time brooding over his secret manpain(which later becomes integral to the case and film)and bellowing, "Police! Freeze!" in the dark, and Al Pacino drawls his way through scenes with all the verve and conviction of a sedated three-toed sloth. They're both saddled with the unappealing task of carrying Brittany Snow, whose character is utterly superfluous except for the fact that the director needed her to invade Det. Ruiney's privacy, root through the file on his wife's murder, and thereby reveal the linchpin for the final act and provide Ruiney with the impetus to embark on a vengeance quest. Ostensibly a journalist(one nominated for a Pulitzer, as she tells any character who will listen), she performs no actual journalism and needs to be rescued from the killer in the end because of course she does.

And the killer? A nobody they pull out of their ass in the final twenty minutes. None of their previous sleuthing so much as hints at his identity, and his motive is so weak as to be embarrassing, as though the writer just went, "Well, time to wrap this up. Let me go to my handy bag of angst cliches and use the first one I find. Ah! This will do! Yes! Al Pacino's character will be a cop who serves an eviction notice on a single father, who in his despair will hang himself in front of his son, who will, naturally, turn into a psychotic killer. Genius! I can smell the Oscar now."

Best scene: Even a sloppily-polished turd like this one is capable of a grace note, and it provides one in the form of Karl Urban as the doting, hopeful husband with a bouquet of hand-picked tulips. He and his wife have been having trouble, you see, but she's called him up and invited him to come home and try to work things out. Filled with love and hope, he rushes home and goes around the back to pick her some tulips, her favorite, before he goes inside. But alas, when he goes inside, he finds her dead, with her short torn open and a huge gash in her chest. It's a standard manpain special, but to watch Karl's face as he goes from the giddy hope of reconciliation with a bunch of fresh-picked tulips in his hand to the horrified realization of what has happened is an unexpected gift. Whatever his professional flaws, he has an exquisite talent for displaying so much emotion with subtle shifts in expression, and he projects a sense of sweetness and vulnerability that few actors ever manage so consistently. Plus, I'm a sucker for small, hopeful romantic gestures performed by characters with their hearts in their hands. My heart melted and broke and the thought of him eagerly picking tulips behind the house in anticipation of making his wife love him again, innocently unaware of what was awaiting him in the house.

Worst scene: While Al Pacino's death ranks up there with Marion Cotillard's in The Dark Knight Rises for hammy unbelievability, Brittany Snow's "stirring", courageous, pro-cop speech in the backseat of the car after the three of them get out of the hospital is mortifying and makes me want to cram my knuckles into my mouth and crawl under the couch to escape the lethal miasma of masturbatory hokum. It's so bad that when she finally lapses into wet-eyed noble silence, Al Pacino just says, "Okay," and starts the car, and Karl looks like he wants to crawl out the passenger window and return the check he took for this job. I'm sure it sounded great on paper, but it fell flat on screen and should've been cut. No, most people don't realize the sacrifices that good cops make, don't understand or care that each of them grapples with their private demons, but to have that speech delivered by that character, whose great trauma was...getting a small scar after being attacked by a cartel member beggars belief. She's sitting in the car with a guy who fought the bogeys in the dark for thirty-six years and a guy who came home to find his wife butchered on the bedroom floor, and they're supposed to be moved and impressed by her retelling of the time some guy pulled a knife on her? You've got to be joking. It's one of the clumsiest, lamest, most insulting speeches I've heard, and it added absolutely nothing.

A dumb, dumb movie, but I've seen worse.