Movie Breakdown: Mortal (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

Well on one side, Andre Ovredal is a fantastic director of scary, scary things. On the other, Nat Wolff is one of those actors that steps into the frame and I shake my head and think, “This movie is going to be awful.” I’ll call it a toss-up.

Post-Screening Ramble:

If you look at the most bare bone structure of what makes a movie, I guess Mortal applies. It is shot on a camera. It has actors. They do things. A story is told. But really, Mortal is the middle chunk of the first film of a very bad trilogy. A slow-moving trudge of a film that repeats itself over and over again – this kid has lightning powers – while it stumbles to the sort of ending that makes you think “Did they run out of budget?” On paper, the film is about Eric, a possibly homeless Norwegian-American (with a Southern accent) who’s on the run from Norwegian police after burning down a barn in the hinterlands. He’s caught, meets a psychiatrist (Iben Akerlie), crashes a helicopter, meets the psychiatrist again, burns down more things, so on and so forth, a bridge thing happens and then the movie slides awkwardly to a finish. This is a film with big intentions and bigger mythology it’s trying to play in, but by the time Andre Ovredal gets to any sort of reckoning with the only interesting parts of the film, the audience has been dragged along by paper thin characters (Priyanka Bose’s American-cop/military/ambassador character is given so little screen time as the villain that by the end of the film, when she pops up for two and half seconds, I honestly couldn’t place her) through action scenes so boring (the ‘car chase’ scene or the ‘bridge scene’ are particularly galling) it doesn’t matter. And then, honestly, the film just ends. There’s a brief spasm of action, lightning, and then boom, no denouement, no character resolution, no nothing – just darkness. In a different world, maybe this was the start of a Nat Wolff superhero franchise, an origin story of sorts, but because, clearly, this film will not be the start of a Norwegian trilogy, it’s just a hard cut to black and then nothing. And you know, it felt like relief.

One Last Thought:

Nat Wolff, wow, you are not the action hero of the future. No sir. Also, your beard needs work.