Serenity (2019)

image courtesy of IMDb.com

The best movie twists are not detrimental to the success of the film. But if a movie depends on one that completely dismantles the entire structure of the film, it better be a master stroke and not, say, the entire series is going on inside an autistic child’s head (props to any reader who understands the reference). I knew the twist going into this one, which didn’t help. But, man oh man. Spoilers ahead.

Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) a fisherman running tours on the sleepy Plymouth Island, chasing an elusive tuna he’s nicknamed “Justice” - until his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) shows up begging him to kill her abusive new husband Frank (Jason Clarke) for $10 million, using an upcoming fishing trip as cover. As Dill wrestles with the morality of it, he starts realizing something’s off with his reality, and it turns out he’s actually a character in a video game his son Patrick (Rafael Sayegh) built, modeled after Patrick’s real dad (a Marine killed in Iraq) and reworked to include his mom and abusive stepdad after she remarried. Once Dill figures out he’s just a construct in his son’s game, he decides to go through with killing Frank anyway - and in the real world, that gives Patrick the courage to actually stab and kill his stepfather himself. Patrick gets charged with murder but is released to his mom’s custody, and afterward he builds a new game where he and his father get to be together again.

This movie so badly wants to be smart and mysterious, and that’s really the whole problem with it. For every clever concept it manages to land - the “rules” stuff with Jeremy Strong actually has some weight to it, some genuine tension about what Dill can and can’t do within the world he doesn’t yet know is fake - there are just as many shortcuts and sidesteps that upend any sense of logical world building. And I want to be fair here: I get that it’s an AI-driven conceptual environment, so some hand-waving comes with the territory. But there’s a difference between a world with its own internal logic and a world that only makes sense because the plot needs it to in the moment. This movie never figures out which one it’s making. I’ve never actually seen Free Guy with Ryan Reynolds, but from what I understand it plays with a similar “can video game characters develop free will” theme - except as an action/comedy, which honestly sounds like the more honest way to handle this premise than whatever Serenity thinks it’s doing by playing it straight and grim.

And to be clear, it’s not that the movie has nothing going for it. The "World’s Greatest Dad" mug Dill uses through the whole film is a genuinely nice touch, a quiet gut-punch once you know what’s actually going on. But then you’ve got the driver’s side being on the right in the truck, clearly meant as one of those “wait, something’s wrong here” simulation clues, and it just doesn’t land the same way. It feels less like a clever breadcrumb and more like the movie tapping you on the shoulder to make sure you noticed how clever it was being.

At the very least, I hope this gave video gamers the courage to murder their abusive stepfather. Is it a cool idea? Maybe? I don’t know. But if it is, the execution is so piss poor it doesn’t matter. This movie is very dumb. And the worst kind of dumb is when a movie thinks it is smart.

1.5 out of 5 Stars