The allegory overload is crushing.Īt night, Baker enjoys sweaty sex with Constance (Diane Lane), who pays him for the privilege and begs him to find her missing cat (more metaphors). Justice, that beast, belongs to him, though he can’t seem to catch him. The thing is Baker goes nuts if any of his customers even come close to hooking the fish.
The movie just plods along as we watch McConaughey, as Iraq veteran turned fishing-boat captain Baker Dill, go tropical on Plymouth Island, a paradise off the Florida coast (the film was shot in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean). Baker and his faithful first mate, Duke (Djimon Hounsou), spend their days taking out rich tourists to hook a tuna Baker calls the “beast” or “Justice” - pick your favorite metaphor. Serenity goes wrong in ways that are more staggeringly dull than perversely delicious. Serenity finds new definitions of bad that almost make the damn thing worth watching for its magnificent flameout.īut almost doesn’t cut it. And yet the batshit bonkers Serenity fails on every level, first as entertainment and then as a new-agey thumbsucker about a magical, mystical tour through the subconscious.
How can you miss with a film noir starring Matthew McConaughey as a fisherman tempted by femme fatale Anne Hathaway to feed her sadistic husband to the sharks for $10 million? And, hell, the script is by Steven Knight, who did himself proud with Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises and directed the formidable Locke with Tom Hardy.