Review of Magic Magic (2013) by Annette S — 30 Nov 2013

Don't ask me how this little indie number featuring "Year One" costars Michael Cera and Juno Temple found its way onto my desk. All I can say is that there are a thousand things I should have done instead of popping it into my DVD player. Solve world hunger, work on my novel, watch Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" for the thousandth time, the list goes on. Alas, that's 97 minutes I won't see again. Instead, I subjected myself to this odd, boring, self-obsessed "thriller" that plays more like an excuse for the cast and crew to visit South America than a film of any real sort.

Let me pump the brakes for a minute and explain what's going on here. We catch up with Alicia and Sara (Juno Temple and "Sucker Punch's" Emily Browning) at the tail-end of an intercontinental trip ending in Chile. Sara has spent the year studying abroad and Alicia, her best friend from the States, decided to visit her for a couple weeks. They meet up with a few of Sara's friends, including the chronically anti-social Brink (played with typical detachment by Michael Cera) and two other uninteresting characters who I really can't be bothered to mention by name. Together they journey to a cabin in backwoods Chile where Alicia proceeds to lose her mind in increasingly ludicrous ways. The kids make fun of her, Brink teases her occasionally and a dog humps her leg. Sounds like a formula for psychological collapse if you ask me.

And yet it's what filmmaker Sabastián Silva insists on again and again. Unfortunately the gloomy locales, stern faces and perpetual crying of Juno Temple don't add up to a thriller. The movie plods along, full of half-cooked dialogue and interrupting characters more at home in an indie comedy a la "Nick and Norah" than a pseudo-thriller.

Even using the term thriller seems like a misnomer here. The film is simply too boring and laughable in its insistence on tension that it feels like a disservice to name it anything but an unintentional comedy. This claim is bolstered by the guffaw-inducing conclusion, which isn't just beyond farfetched. It feels like Silva tore up the script, threw the pieces everywhere and said "F**k it! I'm going home.".

The saddest part of this trifle is that it isn't so bad that it's good; it's just really, really bad. The cinematography is decent, but I chalk that up to co-cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Glenn Kaplan attempting to salvage something from the wreckage for their resume. Lord knows, I've done the same thing on the less reputable sets I've worked on. Unfortunately that's not enough to recommend you do anything with this movie aside from toss it in your dumpster, set the whole thing on fire and blame it on the neighbor kids.