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| Review by Benn Robbins |
Third Person is a hot mess.
When this film ended I couldn’t decide whether or not I had just seen the greatest, most important film of all time, or a steaming pile of garbage.
Thankfully, my brain didn’t betray me and realized it was a steaming pile of garbage.
This “thought provoking,” film really makes you wonder:
a) How does Paul Haggis have, not one, but TWO Oscars?
b) Who keeps giving this hack money?
I get it, Haggis basically won the best picture and writing award for Crash, because Hollywood.
Hollywood watched that film and was like, “Yeah man, that is TOTALLY US. HE gets it.”
So good for you Paul Haggis.
You beat the system.
That is more than I can say for myself and countless others.
What I DO NOT get is how Hollywood has not yet realized that the Emperor has NO New Clothes, but there isn’t even a dang Emperor to begin with.
Haggis is passable and even somewhat good when he adapts screenplays from other source material i.e. Million Dollar Baby and Letters to Iwo Jima. His adaptation for Casino Royale, personally the only screenplay I enjoy of his, is one of the best Bond films out there. Though the source material is brilliant. And to prove my point about how bad he is when writing original material look at the follow up Bond film, Quantum of Solace. That film is horrendous. A mish-mosh of poorly conceived ideas and “clever” plot twists weakly strung together with chase scenes.
But I digress. I am supposed to be writing about THIRD PERSON.
Another multi-story, interwoven lives, all somehow connected premise, THIRD PERSON begins with Liam Neeson (Taken, Love Actually) as a frustrated, former Pulitzer Prize winning writer who can’t come up with his next story. He is having an affair with Anna (Olivia Wilde). Anna is an up and coming writer and she bears a horrible secret. A secret, when revealed is less shocking than, I think, Haggis thinks it is and makes you go, “huh.”
All I can think is that the filmmaker has this strange checklist of potentially shocking things and he couldn’t fit this taboo in Crash so it ended up here and feels like an afterthought.
Next story is that of Corporate fashion “Spy” and American asshole, Scott, played deftly by Adrien Brody (The Pianist, King Kong). He steals high fashion designs before they go public to cut rate companies that mass produce them in sweat-shops. He hates Italy, I only know this because he tells everyone in the film this like 300 times. He meets Monika (Haggis film alum, Moran Atias) a gorgeous Roma woman trying to get back her daughter from some unsavory men.
Or is she?
Finally there is Julia. She is an unemployed mother trying to get her little boy back from, kinda douchy, Rick. She lost custody after a questionably incident involving he son and a dry cleaning bag. Julia is played brilliantly by Mila Kunis (Black Swan, That 70’s Show) and Rick by the ever wonderful, James Franco (Rise of The Planet of The Apes, 127 Hours).
How are these three stories connected?
What do they all have in common?
Who IS the Third Person?
They have all either ‚”lost” a child or something involving childhood or one of them is a shitty parent.
Really, it doesn’t matter.
Seriously.
By the end of this film I didn’t care that Rick was married to Julia’s attorney and due to his negligence their daughter died.
I could have cared less that Liam Neeson lost his son because he was a crappy father who never paid attention to him and took a phone call from his mistress instead of watching him, the same mistress he is sleeping with right now. And as for the weird “connection” made between Mila Kunis’ character and Neeson’s, that was such a stretch that by the time the big “reveal” happens I just wanted my time back.
All these people deserve what they get and got and so will you if you decide to go see this film.
And oh, did I mention that this whole convoluted story is actually taking place in Liam Neeson’s mind and not real at all?
Well now I did.
I just saved you $13.00. $7.00 if you think you might fair better with a matinee.
Good luck if you choose to see this dreck.
