PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Jun 7, 2021 12:43:41 GMT -5
I like to think of myself as an optimist, especially when it comes to movies. I mean, don't we all wish every movie we see to turn out good? And even in the case of The Woman in the Window, a film plagued with ending reshoots and bad word-of-mouth even before the film finally made it in front of audiences by way of being sold off to Netflix and released a year after its intended release...part of me still thought, "Well, with this kind of talent, maybe it won't be THAT bad?" Oh, it's pretty bad. You'd be better off just watching Rear Window again, something which the movie itself kind of nudges you to do by showing it playing on a TV screen not five minutes in. To be fair to The Woman in the Window, though, it wasn't without potential. But the problem with it just comes down to the execution. And the fact that we've seen this kind of story done so much better before doesn't help, either. This movie wants to be Rear Window, but it isn't even Disturbia. An impressive cast is assembled here and to her and the movie's credit, Amy Adams carries this thing kind of effortlessly on her shoulders as the lead. But unfortunately, none of the other players around her are as successful. Gary Oldman in particular gives one off his loud, over-the-top performances that's just simply overwrought, whereas this type of film needed something subtler from his character. But you know, that's another thing -- with a plot like this, there needs to be enough of a seed of doubt planted in both the main character's and audience's minds where the suspense comes from the question of whether or not what was seen was in fact real. The movie does try to play with that by having Adams' character be mentally unsound a lot of the time, but the plot itself just isn't engaging or interesting enough to have that really matter. By the time the movie gets to the "big reveal", it's met with a shrug of indifference before we get to a climax that just comes off as silly. Speaking of silly, that's how a lot of the film comes off sometimes due to some of the preposterous stuff on display and how deadly serious the film decides to play a lot of it. Although, on the positive side, I liked how the vast majority of the film took place inside Adams' character's house, as it lent everything an interesting sort of stage-like quality. Plus, director Joe Wright puts in a few cool visual flourishes here and there to represent how reality for the main character sometimes clashes with fractured memories. To say that The Woman in the Window is underwhelming is an understatement. We all know how there can be times when such a large assortment of talent can produce something so miscalculated, and this is one of those times.
*1/2 /****
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Jun 7, 2021 12:59:40 GMT -5
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Jun 7, 2021 13:39:58 GMT -5
At least it was slightly better than Godzilla vs. Kong. |
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Jun 8, 2021 1:41:41 GMT -5
At least it was slightly better than Godzilla vs. Kong. catching strays. |
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1godzillafan
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I like pie!
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Post by 1godzillafan on Jun 8, 2021 2:41:54 GMT -5
At least it was slightly better than Godzilla vs. Kong. catching strays. Meow. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Jun 12, 2021 10:50:03 GMT -5
The Woman in the Window(6/7/2021)
If you follow the trades you likely knew that The Woman in the Window had the whiff of failure on it throughout the industry given that 20th Century Fox was basically begging Netflix to take it off their hands despite it having been directed by Academy Award adjacent filmmaker Joe Wright and starred a murderer’s row of talent including Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julianne Moore, and Anthony Mackie. Some suspected this nervousness had to do with some emerging controversies surrounding the author of the book this was based on, but no, the movie really is just rather poor. The film is a thriller which draws clear influence (bordering on ripoff) from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and The Lady Vanishes and looks at an agoraphobic woman who sees a murder happen in the house across from her New York brownstone. It’s not easy to point a finger at one thing that makes this movie not work, it’s more of a death by a thousand cuts. The central mystery in the middle of the whole thing is just not very interesting and the film’s general tone is just too over the top to be taken seriously but not over the top enough to be campy fun. Gary Oldman is shouty and over the top in most of his scenes and characters played by Wyatt Russell and Fred Hechinger are just wildly miscalculated. Anthony Mackie is billed third in the movie but he’s barely in it, which suggests to me that much of the sub-plot he was in got left on the cutting room floor. I blame almost all of this on Wright, who clearly wasn’t really sure how seriously to take this material and never came close to striking the right tone. He manages to make a couple moments here and there work but they were few and far between and the movie itself is best left forgotten.
*1/2 out of Five
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