This is a hard movie to review because there were a lot of elements I liked, and many I didn’t. It felt like “Blood Simple” and “Bound” on steroids (and that’s not just a figure of speech; the bodybuilder delves into juicing up in the gym).
Kristen Stewart has been saying in interviews she wanted to give us the most gay thing she could and, well, she delivered. Yet the graphic sex scenes in this movie made sense (as they did in “Bound”); they didn’t in the over-rated “Poor Things.”
Stewart plays Louise “Lou” Langston, who runs a gym. It’s the ‘80s, so we see lots of mullets and bad hairstyles of the sweaty clientele working out. We get a bad sex scene with one of the mullets, played by Dave Franco, in his Camaro. He’s with a woman who is trying to get a job at his gun range/restaurant. That’s our introduction to Jackie, played by Katy O’Brian. She steals the show as a She-Hulk, who isn’t just muscular and menacing, but can be sexy and vulnerable. Jackie and Lou have great chemistry together, yet as the story goes on, it’s hard to really like either of them. And we’ll find out later that the Franco character is Lou’s brother in law. The fight they have over that situation is very well written, and I wish more movies with couples fighting were done like this.
This movie has too many things I’ve seen before, an example being the always great Ed Harris. He plays Lou’s father, and he’s a bad dude. Sporting a wig that makes him look like the crypt keeper, he’s a gun runner into a lot of shady things; oh, and he collects and breeds beetles and bugs. Always a weird hobby for these types of characters, just to add an extra touch of ickiness to their menace.
It seems each act gets more and more ridiculous, and you don’t buy these characters putting themselves in the situations they do. The third act is completely off the rails.
The synth-sounding songs were also rather annoying and, in their first love scene together, the music made it feel like a porn.
There’s an interesting character played by Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of Mikhail (who was great in Manchester by the Sea). She’s a pesky gal who is infatuated with Lou, and is annoying in a humorous way (I was reminded of Bridget Fonda’s character in “Jackie Brown”).
Director Rose Glass (Saint Maud) tried too hard to make this an edgy noir picture, and she’s hit-and-miss with that.
And since 89% of movies have a vomit scene, this does, too (there are two, and both are very, very bizarre).
I never was bored watching this, though.
2 ½ stars out of 5.