Movie Review

Kate Beckinsale and Brian Cox fail to make a family connection in Prisoner's Daughter

Telling stories about people with bad parents has a long history in movies and other art forms. Hell, it could be argued that having a miserable childhood is responsible for half the people (or more) deciding to go into show business in the first place, and putting that on screen is a version of therapy for them.

A bad dad who may or may not deserve redemption is at the center of Prisoner’s Daughter. Max (Brian Cox), in prison for an unspecified crime, is told he will be allowed a compassionate release after his diagnosis with terminal cancer. Trouble is, he is required to live with his daughter, Maxine (Kate Beckinsale), who has never forgiven him for the hell he put her and her now-deceased mother through while she was growing up.

Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

Kate Beckinsale in Prisoner's Daughter.

Max coming to live with her is just one of a host of issues for Maxine, who’s a single mom to an epileptic son, Ezra (Christopher Convery), works two jobs to try to make ends meet, and has a deadbeat addict ex-husband. She clearly has multiple reasons to be angry at the world, but the return of Max brings unexpected changes to her and Ezra’s lives, making it difficult to hate Max just out of habit.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke and written by Mark Bacci, the film is heavy with talented people but light on compelling storytelling. There is zero doubt where the film is headed in the end, so its success is dependent on how the journey is depicted. Unfortunately, nothing that is put on screen is original or interesting, with the filmmakers seemingly content to just check off boxes as they go.

A big part of the problem is the narrative shortcuts the film takes. On multiple occasions, the filmmakers choose to tell and not show why a certain character is the way they are, leaving the audience with almost no way to connect to their story. The inclusion of a side character, Hank (Ernie Hudson), an old friend of Max’s who runs a boxing gym, seems promising, but also doesn’t deliver when it needs to.

Overall, though, the film just never makes you care about its central characters. Call it chemistry, call it what you will, but none of the main three ever establish anything close to the strong feelings they’re supposed to have for each other, leaving their stories without any heft behind them. To pull off an arc of redemption, there needs to be a whole lot more attention to detail than is shown in this movie.

Beckinsale, whose biggest recent role was in the terrible Fool’s Paradise, gives a one-note performance for much of the film, turning a character for whom the audience should have tremendous sympathy into someone you don’t care about at all. Cox is fine if unremarkable as Max, nowhere close to the nuanced role he inhabited in HBO’s Succession. Convery does well as the third lead, but is let down by the lack of connection with any of the other characters.

Prisoner’s Daughter tells a similar story that has been told many times before, but the filmmakers can never find a way to make it rise above that familiarity. People leading difficult lives can be captivating to watch, but only if the people involved figure out a way to make those characters convincing and relatable.

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Prisoner's Daughter opens in theaters on June 30.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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