Chaos Walking (2021 | USA | 109 minutes | Doug Liman)
There comes a time in every Spider-Boy’s life when he must hang up his Spidey suit and go off to war, become addicted to opioids, rob a bunch of banks, and fly off to have adventures in space to establish himself as a credible grown adult actor who can do so much more, as if being the far and away best friendly neighborhood web-slinger in Marvel’s history wasn’t enough. Alas, this spring has been that time for young Tom Holland, who did all of those things in two not that good spring releases. The first, Cherry, saw him teaming up with the Russo brothers on their first post-Avengers outing, making a play as serious filmmakers by adapting Nico Walker’s auto fictional novel. Over the absurdly-long two hour and twenty minute running time, we get near-constant access to Holland’s character’s inner thoughts as he zips through misadventures in college, Iraq, romance with a non-dimensional girlfriend, and a whole lot of insufferable addiction and crime. Fortunately, it seems to have been an AppleTV+, so maybe all but the most devoted Hollandheads may have skipped it in favor of Ted Lasso on their free trials.
I mention Cherry only because of the odd coincidence that Holland’s other big movie this spring Chaos Walking is also an adaptation of a novel (Patrick Ness’s lauded YA dystopian science fiction series, seemingly taking some liberties with the plot) and also gives the audience near-constant access to his character’s every thought, except as a major plot point instead of as a diaristic conceit. In it, Tom Holland plays Tom Hewitt (convenient casting, with those initials), whose claim to fame is being the last boy born on a recently-colonized planet before all of the women were mysteriously killed off by the planet’s indigenous species. Sure, not having a mom is sad and all, but seems to have a cool enough life on the farm with a cute dog, two gay dads (Demian Bichir and Cillian Boyd), and one time the shantytown’s weird mayor gave him a knife.
Oh wait, there’s one very weird thing about this planet: upon entering its atmosphere, all of the human menfolk developed short-range telepathy. All their thoughts farting out in iridescent clouds for anyone within whiffing distance to hear. Did this unexpected development induce compassion and deeper connectivity amongst these colonists? It did not. They are human men, so they mostly spend their time repeating their own names over and over again to disguise their true intention from their fellow bros so as not to show any signs of weakness. It is, as you might expect, incredibly annoying (At least it must’ve been easy for Tom to remember his most repeated line “I’m Todd Hewitt”). But to its credit, the movie doesn’t try to explain it — or the specificity of this curse on men but not women — with any pseudo-scientific jargon. It’s just like, “Men Fart Thoughts, Women All Dead.”
The blessed lack of explanation extends to many elements of the movie’s plot. Like why everyone lives in wooden shacks, except for the mayor (and supreme controller of his own noise) played by Mads Mikkelsen who wears a fabulous fur coat and lives in a gleaming pink space pod with his failson played by Nick Jonas. Or what they’re even doing there in the first place. You get the sense that the Old World turned to shit and humans just hopped into incredibly sophisticated giant space craft, bailed and said, “guess we’ll see you when we see you”, and each followed their own roadmaps to the stars without stopping to ask for directions (wait, that actually sounds very plausible).
Anyway, one day, a space girl from another colonialist starship falls from the sky (Viola, played by Daisy Ridley, also fresh off the Disneyplex and seeking a post-Jedi identity for herself) and it sends all of manville town into a real tizzy. Mayor Mads is worried that more people will come to this hellhole planet, which seems like the opposite of a problem. Young Tom’s immediately smitten since he found her in his barn. The gay dads just want the best for their little spider-buddy; so they put a map in his brain and give him, Viola, the cute dog, and a doomed horse on a head start out of town to potentially safer pastures.
Like the overall film, very little goes right for our young adventurers on their flight from Mads’s murderous mob of mounted men. Even though this movie is really not at all good, it’s one of those “So Many Good People” productions that there’s some entertainment in marveling at how it turned out so flat with such a good cast. I’ve been weirdly invested in Tom Holland since meeting him as a tiny scamp in peril in J.A. Bayona’s emotionally-manipulative The Impossible and he and Ridley have enough of an awkward rapport that following them through the woods isn’t the worst way to burn a couple hours. In addition to everyone mentioned above, it also has David Oyelowo going for it as the town’s apocalypse-spouting guilt-wrecked psychedelic preacher and Cynthia Erivo making a fun appearance as a real boss. But the whole thing never really sparks as anything more than a competently-filmed curiosity (that capitalizes on one of its stars facility for climbing tall structures).
It apparently wrapped filming over three years ago, sat around waiting for it’s young in-demand stars to have time to try to fix bad testings with reshoots, and then sat in the can until the studio sent it as a sacrificial lamb to gradually re-opening movie theaters. I can’t imagine this being my first post-pandemic big screen experience, or even shelling out more than a few bucks for it on PVOD, but I can imagine it having a long tail kicking around on streaming services or basic cable as innocuous background viewing, not quite bad enough to be meme-able or distracting. In that way, I guess, it’s possibly too in control of its own Noise.
Chaos Walking is on a bunch of streaming services via Lionsgate as PVOD starting April 2nd.