...and it is, without a doubt, one of the WORST films I have ever had the misfortune to sit through. It is a truly awful, offensive, unpleasant, and ham-fisted movie.
Let me get the tiny bits of praise out of the way right now. Both female leads are good, but totally under used. The film looks good, but this is achieved by the lazy trick of filming a city at night through different filters (here blue and yellow mostly). Also, Mos Def is good.
However, the character he plays is a horrible racist stereotype, the "good and loyal black servant," that I haven't seen in cinema in decades! He's a decent enough actor, and manages to bring some humour and humanity to an essentially one dimensional role, but he must have been embarrassed sitting up there watching his Steppin' Fetchit role unfold. It's lucky for him that he wasn't really on screen that much.
Brendan Fraser was AWFUL. I've never seen a good film with him in it, and to be honest I didn't know he was in this (just there to see Mos, or Mr. Def as referred to in the credits!), but he is a terrible actor. At some moments, when he was supposed to be portraying the low point to which his character had sunk, he was overacting so badly that at least four or five people around me started laughing! The character he played was incomprehensible too. In an attempt to have his character merely seem complex, he veers wildly between sobbing schoolboy, brutal sadist, doting boyfriend, and petulant cell-phone destroyer (after he threw his second or third phone out the window, we all started laughing at the idiocy of having the exact same "lead character is violent and unstable, he destroys phones" motif repeated again and again).
Scott Glen was okay, I suppose. He did what he could with some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film, but his character just didn't have anything going on beyond some very obvious and heavy-handed moments with his young son ("see, he is a complex man, he is a pimp who loves his son, I am a smart writer/director!).
As I said, earlier, both Alice Braga and Catalina Sandino Moreno are good, but have nothing to do except look scared and get battered.
By the way, if you ever have the misfortune of seeing this film, please pay attention to the use of language. The clumsy way all the characters, even when it's a Nigerian talking to a Brazilian, transition into English is hilarious!
The "plot" is a derivative mess of neo-noir clichés, and is so full of holes that I could have driven a bus up the red carpet and through the movie with no problems. I'm not going to dignify the film by summarizing it, but lets just say that it involves a drug deal gone bad, a crooked cop, a few double-crosses, and a wacky shootout where multiple people who've been shot still manage to shoot back and take their own killer out. Total bull, and ripped from so many other movies that I can't even list them, though if you've seen Lock, Stock and Reservoir Dogs (itself a near parody of other noir crime movies), then you've seen everything in this film's plot, done waaaaaay better. Oh, and there's an exotic psychic dude thrown in for good measure, just in case you didn't get the memo that read "Brazil is exotic."
And so, we come to the worst part of the movie: its location in Brazil. There is absolutely NO NECESSARY REASON for this movie to be set in Brazil, other than to dress a super-crappy crime film up with exoticized characters (in short, racist stereotypes) and locales. As it began, I was hoping for something that actually engaged with the complexities of Brazil, like maybe City of God, but this film is the polar opposite to that one! Do not believe anyone who says this movie is like City of God! They share nothing in common, Journey to the End of the Night could be set in any city in the world. The hilarious thing is, I was watching it and thinking that here was another example of a filmmaker using an exotic/strange/dangerous setting to make a totally boring movie SEEM more interesting, and then the director, Eason, gets up in the Q&A session and ADMITS IT!!! Someone asked why Brazil, and he basically said "No reason, just wanted to set the story somewhere exotic!" And he had the gall to suggest that he was thereby doing something revolutionary, because this was a movie that wasn't about middle class white men! Eh, hello, you hypocrite?? The two leads are middle class white men!! The movie is about them, they just happen to be in Sao Paolo exploiting Brazilians and an African! They're on the screen the majority of time, and are the only characters with any discernible agency.
I could go on and on, and I have probably gone on way too long, but I'm procrastinating on some work, and this was easily one of the worst films I have ever, ever seen... and I've seen The Avengers!
In sum: the characters are terrible, most of the performances are as bad as the characterizations, the plot is boring and derivative, the dialogue is laughable, and the politics of the whole endeavour are deeply suspect. Eason made a film about some white men exploiting some Brazilians. He somehow missed the irony of his being a white man setting a movie in Sao Paolo JUST to exploit stereotypical ideas about Brazil...
Let me get the tiny bits of praise out of the way right now. Both female leads are good, but totally under used. The film looks good, but this is achieved by the lazy trick of filming a city at night through different filters (here blue and yellow mostly). Also, Mos Def is good.
However, the character he plays is a horrible racist stereotype, the "good and loyal black servant," that I haven't seen in cinema in decades! He's a decent enough actor, and manages to bring some humour and humanity to an essentially one dimensional role, but he must have been embarrassed sitting up there watching his Steppin' Fetchit role unfold. It's lucky for him that he wasn't really on screen that much.
Brendan Fraser was AWFUL. I've never seen a good film with him in it, and to be honest I didn't know he was in this (just there to see Mos, or Mr. Def as referred to in the credits!), but he is a terrible actor. At some moments, when he was supposed to be portraying the low point to which his character had sunk, he was overacting so badly that at least four or five people around me started laughing! The character he played was incomprehensible too. In an attempt to have his character merely seem complex, he veers wildly between sobbing schoolboy, brutal sadist, doting boyfriend, and petulant cell-phone destroyer (after he threw his second or third phone out the window, we all started laughing at the idiocy of having the exact same "lead character is violent and unstable, he destroys phones" motif repeated again and again).
Scott Glen was okay, I suppose. He did what he could with some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film, but his character just didn't have anything going on beyond some very obvious and heavy-handed moments with his young son ("see, he is a complex man, he is a pimp who loves his son, I am a smart writer/director!).
As I said, earlier, both Alice Braga and Catalina Sandino Moreno are good, but have nothing to do except look scared and get battered.
By the way, if you ever have the misfortune of seeing this film, please pay attention to the use of language. The clumsy way all the characters, even when it's a Nigerian talking to a Brazilian, transition into English is hilarious!
The "plot" is a derivative mess of neo-noir clichés, and is so full of holes that I could have driven a bus up the red carpet and through the movie with no problems. I'm not going to dignify the film by summarizing it, but lets just say that it involves a drug deal gone bad, a crooked cop, a few double-crosses, and a wacky shootout where multiple people who've been shot still manage to shoot back and take their own killer out. Total bull, and ripped from so many other movies that I can't even list them, though if you've seen Lock, Stock and Reservoir Dogs (itself a near parody of other noir crime movies), then you've seen everything in this film's plot, done waaaaaay better. Oh, and there's an exotic psychic dude thrown in for good measure, just in case you didn't get the memo that read "Brazil is exotic."
And so, we come to the worst part of the movie: its location in Brazil. There is absolutely NO NECESSARY REASON for this movie to be set in Brazil, other than to dress a super-crappy crime film up with exoticized characters (in short, racist stereotypes) and locales. As it began, I was hoping for something that actually engaged with the complexities of Brazil, like maybe City of God, but this film is the polar opposite to that one! Do not believe anyone who says this movie is like City of God! They share nothing in common, Journey to the End of the Night could be set in any city in the world. The hilarious thing is, I was watching it and thinking that here was another example of a filmmaker using an exotic/strange/dangerous setting to make a totally boring movie SEEM more interesting, and then the director, Eason, gets up in the Q&A session and ADMITS IT!!! Someone asked why Brazil, and he basically said "No reason, just wanted to set the story somewhere exotic!" And he had the gall to suggest that he was thereby doing something revolutionary, because this was a movie that wasn't about middle class white men! Eh, hello, you hypocrite?? The two leads are middle class white men!! The movie is about them, they just happen to be in Sao Paolo exploiting Brazilians and an African! They're on the screen the majority of time, and are the only characters with any discernible agency.
I could go on and on, and I have probably gone on way too long, but I'm procrastinating on some work, and this was easily one of the worst films I have ever, ever seen... and I've seen The Avengers!
In sum: the characters are terrible, most of the performances are as bad as the characterizations, the plot is boring and derivative, the dialogue is laughable, and the politics of the whole endeavour are deeply suspect. Eason made a film about some white men exploiting some Brazilians. He somehow missed the irony of his being a white man setting a movie in Sao Paolo JUST to exploit stereotypical ideas about Brazil...