CHICAGO – Patrick McDonald of HollywoodChicago.com appears on “The Morning Mess” with Dan Baker on WBGR-FM (Monroe, Wisconsin) on March 21st, 2024, reviewing the new streaming series “Manhunt” – based on the bestseller by James L. Swanson – currently streaming on Apple TV+.
Film Review: Tensionless ‘Water For Elephants’ Fatally Mismatches Leads, Casts Spot-On Supporters
CHICAGO – While Robert “Twilight” Pattinson has persuasively branched out beyond his typecasting of reanimated and preternatural corpses, his miscast union in the tensionless “Water for Elephants” with pin-up circus spectacle Reese Witherspoon works as well as an elephant trying to spoon a sworn-enemy lion.
Rating: 2.5/5.0 |
Despite an uneven plot progression that theatrically only brings a comatose life to Sara Gruen’s 2006 best-selling historical novel, sadistic ringmaster Christoph Waltz (Oscar winner for Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”) and flashback story teller Hal Holbrook (Oscar nominated for Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”) are the film’s only redeeming salvations.
Waltz, who’s hopelessly haunting in 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds” as the film’s principal Nazi nemesis, resuscitates similar gestures and speech patterns. While he’s playing a very similar character within a completely different and convoluted traveling circus story, he’s the primary character who’s making interesting use of his supporting screen time. Casting and then dropping Sean Penn for a Waltz replacement is one of the few things this film got right.
Read Adam Fendelman’s full review of “Water for Elephants”. |
While the film doesn’t delve into compelling book developments such as the revelation that Waltz’s character (August) is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, so does it only glance over the literary themes of a love triangle, trialing a man’s moral compass, circus life during the depression, mental illness, emotions versus clear-mindedness, self-worth and illusion versus reality.
Gruen’s decision to aptly name Jacob (played in the film by Pattinson) is drawn from the backbone of the story’s parallels to the biblical story of Jacob in the Book of Genesis.
Image credit: David James, 20th Century Fox