This is the kind of film we hope for whenever we take the risk of sitting down to watch some off-the-beaten-track independent movie.
Steep odds to expect a gem. If you've checked out our recent posts on Indie films, you know that most of the recent ones we suffered through were comparable to having hot needles driven through our eyes.......
Compared to them, "Colossal" comes across as a goddamn masterpiece.
How to explain this movie........well, we could go all snarky. And say things like 'try to imagine "Pacific Rim" if it had been written and directed by the princes of Mumblecore, the Duplass brothers...."
We will say that we're in total of awe of writer-director Nacho Vigalondo. Anybody with the artistic balls to blend a boilerplate dysfunctional Indie relationship drama with stomping, roaring Kaiju creatures tearing up South Korea.........from now on we'll go out of our way to see this guy's work whenever it surfaces.
A huge BQ Best Actress nomination to Anne Hathaway, committed and talented enough to breathe life into that most tiresome of Indie archetype characters........the wasted, Millennial slacker who goes crawling back to their rural hometown after abject failure in New York City.
And a surprising (to us) BQ Best Actor to Jason Sudeikis, who takes his typical lightweight-friendly-guy-next-door persona and deepens it, darkens it into a performance that's dangerous, borderline frightening and ultimately sad and pathetic.
Warning......we're about to spill the premise here, which we absolutely do not consider a spoiler since it's what the whole freakin' movie is about....
Hathaway and Sudeikis, to their astonishment, amusement and horror, discover that the two gigantic entities wreaking death and destruction in downtown Seoul, a reptilian thing and a robot........are nothing more than solidified projections of their own depression and resentful anger.
When they drunkenly stagger around a playground in their small town, the two monsters, like doppelganger marionettes, do likewise in Korea.....
And oh what a bummer for the Seoul populace......as the leviathan stand-ins for Hathaway and Sudeikis squish them in the streets.....
A gloriously outrageous concept, with some outrageously funny sequences. This movie stunned us with the sheer craziness of the way it managed
to mock its flawed characters while still humanely dealing with them.
Enough said. We roar out 4 stars (****).....and recommend you have yourself a colossal good time with "Colossal"
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