Materialists

⭐ 4/10

I loved Past Lives! And now the writer/director gets a massive budget with some known stars to make her follow-up? Of course I am in. This movie was terrible. I will say we had a great time talking about this movie after, what our favourite parts were, laughing at the bad parts, pitching better ideas that the movie should have used. But otherwise this was a sterile bland movie.

It starts off in a unique way, something I found kind of intriguing, especially when it cuts from that to our leading lady doing her makeup in the modern world, and that gave me hope. But by the ending came I had already given up hope that it would be good, and then it circles back to that opening scene in the most uninteresting eye-roll way, honestly so lame.

The main sin here is that Dakota Johnson simply cannot act. She is so dry and unemotional. But Tim, you say, that's the character here! She's a calculating matchmaker in the big city who views all relationships as calculus, even her own. That's true, but even with that she is totally unwatchable. Completely lacking emotion, with no chemistry between either men in this triangle. And that brings us to Pascal, with this movie another in a long list of "is he even good" accusations. Does he actually want to be in this movie? He has no charm or charisma in a role that should be an absolute slam dunk. Him and Dakota have zero chemistry, and again, maybe the point of the movie, since his rich-guy unicorn thing is the male side of this calculated relationship business, but still. There is one scene where they talk about the currency in relationships, and how for men height is such a big factor, and it takes an interesting but kind of goofy twist. But for a moment I was effected, and then there is this wide cut out that is so ridiculous I burst out laughing, and I think it was supposed to have the opposite effect.

Both these two boring people look even worse when Chris Evans is around, who is absolutely glowing and the only good part of this movie. He is so handsome, and so poor, and so sad, you feel so strongly for him. But why does he love her so much? He just does, okay. Him on screen is the only time I was invested, but I wanted him to just leave her behind. He is way too good looking to be a believable struggling actor. Shout out to the scene where he asks her why she quit acting, and she says she was never really good at it. You don't say...

The writing here is abysmal, just Dakota going on and on about the science that is her job. It's intentionally funny how cold and brutal she is at times, but I can't express how unwatchable I found her delivering this overly serious dialog. How did this happen?

Big disappointment here, although I will say I wasn't bored or actively angry at the movie, just baffled at how not good it was.