Chaos Walking (2021)

User Review

• 

  d_riptide

  2 / 10

  It has become exceedingly common for any big budget movie or TV show to go through reshoots after a sticky situation like a failed test screening or whatever but it feels more and more like they’re supposed to spell death out to any movie that absolutely HAS to go through it. While that’s not the case for most films, I can’t say the same for “Chaos Walking”. Unironically, it’s become a controlled chaos of its own making as another victim of extensive reshoots and delays.
  
  While the editing is far from this movies biggest caveat, the butchering on its own hacked the film into so many pieces, I am 100% sincere when I say I legitimately could not keep track of what the overarching narrative was supposed to be about. Because the bloody film restarts itself almost every twenty minutes, it loses track of its own damn story; plot threads continuously come out of nowhere, drop out the film entirely or outright contradict one another. We don’t get much chemistry between Holland and Ridley, every performance from every actor feels relatively strained, some dialogue exchanges are difficult to hear, thefew clever bits of world-building it entails in the first act betray a movie that’s deathly afraid of its own foundation, said foundation has a structure with no spine or dimension to build upon, transitions between cuts are very choppy and make zero connection between storylines, characters are uninvolving, emotional stakes never fully take hold, the physical action invariably promises more than it delivers and the most intriguing concepts the film had for any sort of progression is nothing more than chaotic, annoying white noise.
  
  
  Because of all this, endurance becomes a big problem from the get-go; I was bored almost immediately going into this. I’m honestly kind of baffled at the fact that they had all this time to do something more productive with this project than they did and after a DECADE later, they STILL pushed it out looking half-finished. Seriously, people were excited for THIS?

  Like?

  1 member likes this review.