Movie Breakdown: Bliss (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

There is something, how you might say, off about the trailer for this new Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek vehicle. It looks like an episode of Black Mirror but with a clear bend towards sugary blandness. Expectations are low.

Post-Screening Ramble:

I’m not going to sugar-coat this: Bliss is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long, long, long time. Owen Wilson plays, sigh, Greg, a blandly corporate person who does … something. He’s clearly having some issues at his job and with his family and spends most of the, not kidding, first fifteen minutes of the film sketching out a picture of Salma Hayek smoking a cigarette. Soon after his boss kills himself, he goes to a bar and meets Isabel (Hayek), a homeless woman with the power to mess with reality. Greg and Isabel proceed to go on a low-key “crime” spree using their “powers” to knock down elderly roller skaters and crush cars who give them bad looks. Somehow smokable crystals become a thing and then, well, Greg departs the reality we’ve come to understand and enters … look, I’m not going to sit around trying to explain this film. It’s a low-rent Twilight Zone with aspirations of saying a lot about addiction, but instead gets lost between a grade-D performance by Salma Hayek (literally half of the film feels like she’s screen-testing for Time Bandits) and the inscrutable mystery box of the script. If you are going to see this film, don’t try to figure anything out, because nothing is ever explained. Instead the film lumbers towards a conclusion and just when you think it finally has something to say, it ends. Boom. Over. And though I will say that I did yell at the screen in sheer shock, once it had dissipated, the only thing I felt was relief.

Bliss arrives on Amazon Prime this Friday, February 5.

One Last Thought:

I will say Owen Wilson’s character develops this crazy like telepathic Etch-a-Sketch thing that looks pretty cool. It reads your mind … and then draws it.