Review of The Last Face (2017) by Dottheeyes — 19 Aug 2017

Within the space of a single showing on the French Riviera, an ambitiously mounted action-drama-romance film with an A-list cast and an Oscar-winning crew became a pariah, not shown again for several months and unseen in the United States until an unheralded on-demand release over a year later.

Unfortunately, The Last Face is deserving of its fate. I am an admirer of Sean Penn the director; with The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, and Into the Wild, he proved himself a distinctive and engaging cinematic storyteller and transcended any actor-turned-director vanity-project stigma.

But, wow, his first directorial failure is a momentous and peculiar one. There are a thousand and one ways to criticize The Last Face. I am not, as a hard-and-fast rule, opposed to the idea of a film focused on a Doctors Without Borders-type organization, but it is hard not to notice the conspicuous absence of a single interesting or multi-dimensional black character in a film almost entirely set in Africa.

They are simply extras, present to smile or dance or, most frequently, violently die, while a banal Western love story is foregrounded. A love story in name only which drains Javier Bardem of his usual charisma and vigor and forces poor Charlize Theron to deliver nearly constant, wince-inducing voice-over.

Sample: "The resilience and beauty offered by the refugees of war inspired an intoxication of intimacy, and in this place of so much war, had I found peace?" Just as tone-deaf and uncomfortably navigated are the lapses into didacticism, when characters express hoary the-world-doesn't-care opinions or deliver entire sermons-speeches on humanitarianism.

The film is overwrought in several ways—a busy structure (lots of "ten days earlier in such-and-such place"-type subtitles), a cacophonous score of World-music chants and laments by Hans Zimmer—yet also thinly imagined, easily distracted, and without a convincing emotional center.

There are even moments approaching genuine-albeit-unintentional camp comedy; consider a scene in which the two leads flirt via aggressive, flamboyant brushing of their teeth. Dental hygiene as mating dance.

It beggars description...