'Serenity' Is All Wet. Literally.
Call it the M. Night Shyamalan problem: Should a film distinguished by howlingly tin-eared dialogue, emaciated characters and a plodding, easily guessed plot be pardoned its crimes when its maker reveals after 90 or so minutes that he's made his illusion less than fully persuasive ... on purpose?
There are a million potential answers to this insoluble aesthetic quandary, but the only correct one is: Nnnnnnnnope!
Certainly not when the movie comes to us from aand and the writer-director of — a drama in which he and Tom Hardy, owner of the only face seen in the entire film, held us rapt for 85 minutes without ever leaving the confines of an SUV. A filmmaker who can pull off something that formally audacious ought to be able to handle a seemingly conventional neo-noir like the new , but the underwhelming results indicate Knight might've laid out in the sun for too long. ("I had so much bad [expletive] rum I lost my grease," drawls its hero, diagnosing both himself and the movie.)
