Long before it face-plants entirely, about halfway through, Phillip Noyce’s The Desperate Hour is already kneecapped with cliches. From the first shots of Naomi Watts, our queen of Grief Bomb Moms, lying in bed alone, eyeballing the widowing hubby in the nightstand photo, there isn’t a narrative or visual idea in the film that doesn’t come with a recycling triangle stamped on its rump.
Ah, well—griping about cliches is its own cliche. With teary pluck, Watts’s Ms. Misery sends her grade-schooler to school, prods her mopey high school son to get up, and goes for a restorative jog in the apparently enormous nearby forest. So far, so mediocre—except that’s the whole film.
A dogged one-hander, in which Watts gets herself stranded in the lovely Ontario woods with an iPhone while a school shooter incident locks down her son’s high school, Noyce’s movie does muster a helpless anxiety—for a while. Often in red-eyed close-up, Watts is a template of panic, talking to a half dozen different friends and acquaintances in a frantic effort to find out where her son is (he roused and left, we hear), and to get to the school ASAP. But the problem with the film’s odd low-budget subgenre (think Locke, The Guilty, etc.) is that the law of diminishing returns always kicks in pretty quickly—there’s only this one harried woman to watch, and everything else is radio. And unlike in those other movies, the off-screen voices here don’t create dramatic trouble but simply offer microdoses of information. It’s all on Watts’s sweaty shoulders. And of course, she twists her ankle and hits her head on a rock in the process.
It certainly doesn’t sell you on the benefits of going for a good run. All the same, her character’s juggling of multiple apps and simultaneous phone calls while limping and panting in the middle of nowhere can be impressive—it’s like a high-stress how-to video on all the things you can do with your phone at the same time. Go, branded content!
But entire movies about someone talking and texting on a cell phone? Stop the planet, I’m deboarding. For his part, Noyce, in his 70s, has a light work week, leaving what seems like a full 50% of the visual choices up to whoever was in control of the drone camera soaring over the treetops. But then disaster strikes, and in a single moment, Chris Sparling’s spec script starts eating itself, turning the film from a one-note study in maternal terror into a laughable exercise in privileged mega-Mom activism. Or something—I can say without spoiling your disappointment that what gas Watts was able to pump into the sparse scenario dissipates in a wisp, and the contrivances pile up like robotexts.
The only takeaway from Noyce’s film is that school shootings are now so common, so banal, that they can shruggingly serve as a genre movie McGuffin, without the filmmakers ever veering close to the nagging question of what the hell is wrong with us. (Scroll down the Wikipedia list and watch the number of incidents and victims accelerate with each passing decade.) Going macro is asking a lot, of course, when the movie itself barely gets out of the woods. ❖
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