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| Review by Sharon Knolle |
Did Stanley Kubrick fake the 1969 moon landing?
That’s what one of the overly obsessed fans in Room 237 movie believed The Shining was really about and he’s not the only one who clings to that far-out theory.
Moonwalkers takes that “what if” premise and has some fun with it: What if NASA was trying to cover its bases in case the mission tanked?
What if they turned to a highly unstable CIA agent (Perlman) to recruit the famous director to film a back-up, just in case? And what if ne’er-do-well band manager Jonny (Grint) somehow takes the meeting instead of his agent cousin and passes off his druggie friend Leon (Sheehan) as Kubrick?
Add in a suitcase full of cash, a debt owed to some brutal gangsters, a hippie art commune happy to help make a movie about the moon and a lead singer who thinks the whole show is all about him and you’ve got a fairly entertaining (if wildly far-fetched) lark.
Is it plausible that Perlman (who’s dangerously unhinged by his experiences in Vietnam) trusts a group of hippies to pull off this crucial mission? Not remotely, nor is the fact that the film the commune makes is actually quite close to the real thing.
But it’s amusing to see Perlman forced to don a flowery hippie shirt, take an accidental drug trip and still outgun what seems like every gangster in England.
Grint, as always, makes a likeable (if not quite on-the-ball) protagonist and Robert Sheehan is funny as the always high Leon.
Rating: 3 out of 5
