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I hate Huckabees
David O Russell's self-styled 'Existential comedy' is his first film since the excellent 'Three Kings' and comes as a grave disappointment. Coming across like a nightmare collaboration between Charlie Kaufman and Woody Allen, the film lacks the emotional core of Kaufman's best work and the sly wit of Allen's, leaving nothing more than a series of dull, inconsequential sketches which add up to very little.
There's not much of a plot here but what little there is concerns enviromental activist Albert(Jason Scwartzman), who is troubled by a series of coincidences involving a tall African man. He seeks help from a pair of existential detectives(Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to investigate these incidents and they start to intrude on every aspect of his life. Albert then gets involved in a dispute with Brad(Jude Law), a high-flying executive of the Huckabees chain store, and forms a friendship with troubled firefighter Tommy(Mark Wahlberg). Russell fills the screen with endless visual tricks(almost all of which are poorly handled), everyone shouts a lot and the film jumps from one surreal skit to the next at a mile a minute. For a while during this picture, I wondered if I just wasn't getting it. But I soon realised that there's actually nothing to get. Russell spends the entire film spewing out numerous half-formed philosophical ideas with no real idea of where they're leading. The cast make a fair stab at overcoming the material but only a couple of them are succesful. You know you're in trouble when Mark Wahlberg and Jude Law are the best two actors in your film, and that's the case here as only those two have the sense to play it straight(Wahlberg is also responsible for the few genuinely funny scenes). As for the rest, Schwartzman and Tomlin are unbearable while Naomi Watts and Hoffman are simply trying to hard. Isabelle Huppert, however, is completely wasted; if you're going to get one of the world's finest actresses in your film, do try and give her something interesting to do. This is a deeply unlikeable, unfunny mess of a film; seldom has a picture talked so much, so loudly, and said so little. Russell is a director with potential but has completely neglected any sense of humanity in his desperate strive for 'wackiness' here. 'I Heart Huckabees' is a disjointed, pointless and hugely disappointing affair; totally lacking any real substance, humour or(ironically) heart. |
