Should I start by saying that I think Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius? He's one of my favorite directors and "There Will Be Blood" and "Magnolia" are well placed in my all time top 50.
So what the hell happened with INHERENT VICE?
The cast is enormous and talented. Joaquin Phoenix is Doc, a drug addled, sandle-wearing hippie gumshoe in 1970 trying to track down his old lady, who's gone missing with a bad dude....oh come on, don't let me even pretend to act like I understood one bit of this rambling, ridiculous, occasionally interesting but mostly boring mess.
It takes some sort of hellish serendipity in one film to have Reese Witherspoon as an FBI secretary, Josh Brolin as a crazy cop named Bigfoot, Owen Wilson as a hippie agent, Martin Short as a coke-sniffing, sex maniac dentist and Benecio Del Toro, who keeps popping up to rattle off plot points that only confuse the viewer more.
Am I missing something? Would I have to be a stoned dentist like Marty Short to understand this disaster?
I couldn't wait to see this movie and it bored me from beginning to end. You'll laugh a couple times, but at nearly two and half hours its excruciating. It's also got the worst narration since the studio forced Ridley Scott to add Harrison Ford's voiceovers to "Blade Runner". At least the Director's cut of that eventually dumped that mistake.
They said the Thomas Pynchon novel on which the film is based was unfilmable. They were right.
A pretentious, incomprehensible mess, Inherent Vice gets a D.
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