Review of Mute (2018) by Thequietgamer — 29 Mar 2018

A mute, Amish bartender searches for his girlfriend in futuristic Berlin. Which in 2035 will apparently look like a garish and surprisingly dull version Blade Runner. It's pretty amazing that such a good looking and crowded movie can feel so devoid of life. A lot of work went into the visuals, but it doesn't feel like any was put into giving the film a soul. There's a missing layer of depth to go underneath the shiny exterior to imbue Mute with any sort of meaning or purpose.

Not all of our time is spent with the silent protagonist. Director and writer Duncan Jones dedicates a lot of his passion project to the side-characters "Cactus Bill" (Paul Rudd) and "Duck" (Justin Theroux). An AWOL soldier and pedophile respectively. While both sides of the story eventually tie into each other (without any feeling of payoff), it's still hard to tell why they needed to be included in the first place. All they do is have inane conversations about things that are never explained to the audience in a satisfactory manner and only serve to make the limp events of the film movie by at an even more plodding pace. Not even the occasional splashes of sex and violence do much to add any energy to the film.

To top things off Mute is tonally inconsistent. This future noir tries to go for dark and brooding, but is often undermined by Jones' quirky sense of humor that's quite frankly never as funny as it wants to be. You get a sense that the movie is trying to say something. What that is remains a mystery. It's such an odd amalgam of pieces that whatever message Jones intended to deliver got lost long before the final product was released. Even with the easy to follow plot, things are shockingly incoherent in this bit of sci-fi drudgery.

Mute's saving grace is Paul Rudd, whose frequent outburst are sometimes amusing. Unfortunately his performance is held prisoner in this boring and overall pointless feeling movie. Perhaps one could get a grasp of whatever Jones was trying to get across to viewers after watching it another time or two. Maybe even picking up on the hidden genius of the film and allowing it to attain cult status. I personally doubt it and don't see anyone even trying to after suffering through it a first time (if they even got that far). I suppose there is one thing Mute gets right. The essential nature of noir is that there are no heroes. With the credits being about the only thing to route for here, the movie does manage to capture that quality. Just for the wrong reasons.