It’s unclear what Mike Myers is up to as the doddering janitor who skulks around the background and speaks in an exhumed Austin Powers voice, but you don’t have to be Dashiell Hammett to figure out that he’s not just there for comic relief. “Death is by far the best bit of life!” Annie chirps like a manic pixie dream accomplice, epitomizing Stein’s cringeworthy attempts to marry the playfulness of Wonderland with the nihilism of noir. There’s only so much asinine chatter you can stomach before you’re ready for everyone in “Terminal” to throw themselves onto the tracks. Like everything else in this refried mess, Bill’s conversations with the waitress build to a woefully contrived twist, but the journey is more of a bummer than the destination. The film’s splintered timeline (natch) contains these killers to their own plot, so they never cross paths with a wimpy English professor named Bill (Simon Pegg), who stumbles into Annie’s restaurant in search of the push he needs to commit suicide. Alfred (Max Irons) is the impetuous young gun, while Vince (Dexter Fletcher) is the misogynistic veteran who’s run out of patience for his partner, and for everything else. Most of the moribund story takes place here, the diner becoming a nexus for most of Stein’s broad caricatures.įirst up are the aforementioned assassins, both impatiently waiting for orders from their mysterious client. After a maddeningly convoluted intro in which it’s established that Bonnie plans on turning two hitmen against each other, Robbie is reintroduced in a second role: Annie, a sociopathic waitress who works at a diner in the world’s bleakest train station (like the rest of the sets in the film, the eatery is built on a massive Hungarian soundstage, the artificial darkness creating an atmosphere that’s dense and empty in equal measure). Read More: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’: Margot Robbie Entering Final Talks to Play Sharon Tate - ReportĪnd she does it twice over. Playing Bonnie in a way that makes Harley Quinn seem perfectly well-adjusted by comparison, Robbie delivers a performance that’s heightened enough to harken back to the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. If nothing else, “Terminal” makes good on that promise. That cloying narration is provided by a contract killer called Bonnie ( Margot Robbie, desperately trying to will the film to life), and she finishes it off by insisting that she’s insane enough to thrive in this anonymous pit of vipers. The Best 30 LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
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Some say to survive it you need to be as mad as a hatter.” Okay, but it’s hard to imagine a rabbit having any use for such a shallow hole.
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As the film’s dark city is described by one of its most demented residents: “There is a place like no other on Earth - a land full of wonder, mystery, and danger. Stein’s exhausting pastiche unfolds like a cross between “Alice in Wonderland” and “Sin City,” as its dire cast of hitmen, femme fatales, and shadowy masterminds are filtered through a neon underworld where nonsense is the only kind of sense that anyone has left. That being said, this candied genre mishmash owes much less to Mary Shelley than it does to Lewis Carroll or Frank Miller. An effective cure to whatever lingering nostalgia you might have for the chintzy, winking, hyper-stylized neo-noirs that flooded the indie film market in the wake of “Pulp Fiction,” Vaughn Stein’s “ Terminal” takes a mess of dead tropes and Frankensteins them together into an crime saga that’s in desperate need of brains.