The Wrong Camp, Brother!

When you dedicate yourself to liking an actor or actress, you will inevitably come across a movie or two that is not worth their talents.  That’s how I’m going to explain how I found myself renting Mojave on Amazon.  Oscar Isaac is a great actor and has been on one hell of a tear.  Inside Llewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year, Ex Machina, Show Me a Hero, and a little movie called Star Wars: The Force Awakens have all showcased Isaac’s immense talent and have been extremely well regarded.  And he is, without a doubt, the most entertaining part of this movie.

Written and directed by William Monahan (he of Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed screen writing fame), Mojave tells the the decidedly inane story of a world famous actor named Thomas (played with aching ineptitude by Garrett Hedland) who, whilst apparently in the throes of a wicked bout of Affluenza, decides to drive into the desert, get wasted, and die in some manner or another.  He drinks a bunch, yells at coyotes, and wrecks his sweet ride on purpose; all in the name of artistic angst, which he apparently feels quite strongly.

While on his lost weekend he meets up with a weirdo, Shakespeare quoting, potential murderer named Jack (Oscar Isaac).  They have a wee chat by the fire driving Thomas to then promptly attack Jack, knocking him out, taking his gun, etc.  A thing you apparently do when you’re in the desert.  Thomas finds himself in even more of a predicament when he then mistakes a park ranger for Jack, and kills him with Jack’s rifle.  The rest of the movie is a whirlwind of action as these two are pitted against one another in a game of cat and mouse that could only have been birthed in a desert (where all great things happen, you know).

The plot, and what happens to Thomas, don’t really matter all that much to your enjoyment of the movie–if there’s any to be had. This is the only thing I’ve ever seen Garrett Hedlund in and he’s not great.  It would be a much better movie if an actor more capable had played the role, or if it had been treated with a little less self-serious, existential dread.  The dialogue, too, was just atrocious.  Completely overly wrought and presented in a way that doesn’t resemble the way that anyone in the world talks at all.

That being said, some of the lines delivered by Oscar Isaac, who seems to totally commit to the role, do come off as really funny.  There’s an especially good 10 minutes where Isaac delivers all of the lines to a dog that he has basically kidnapped and, in that context, it’s actually really hilarious.  Isaac isn’t the only fun part either.  There are some strange and funny performances from Walter Goggins as Thomas’s agent and also by Mark Wahlberg who, for some reason, agreed to be in this movie.  Wahlberg is hilarious as Norman, Thomas’s business partner, and ex-coke dealer, and a Chinese food & hooker aficionado.  You can’t help but laugh out loud when Norman walks half clothed onto his balcony and screams “I OWN HALF A CLAM HOUSE IN NORMAN’S PORT” to no one in particular.

Unfortunately, all of these fun weird things are ruined whenever Hedlund hits the screen again.  In this role he’s both boring and annoying, a combination that does the movie no favors.  When the inevitable head-to-head final confrontation of Mojave occurs, you’re well beyond caring what happens, if you’re not more engrossed in your phone at that point.  Needless to say, it seems like Monahan could have done amazing things with this cast that he was handed for this movie.  Unfortunately, brother, that’s just not the case.