Derek Winnert

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This article was written on 15 Oct 2017, and is filled under Uncategorized.

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Downsizing ** (2017, Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Rolf Lassgård, Udo Kier) – Movie Review 

Co-writer/ director Alexander Payne’s ecologically minded sci-fi social satire follows the story of kindly married occupational therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon), who undergoes a a newly invented procedure to be shrunken to four inches tall so that he and his wife (Kristen Wiig) can enjoy the comfy lifestyle they can’t afford in the big world. Hey, it’s cheaper when everything comes small – and there’s way less garbage! – let’s save the planet!!

That shrinking feeling: Hong Chau and Matt Damon.

Following in the wake of The Incredible Shrinking Man and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, this finds nothing much new to say on the shrinking subject, so the law of diminishing returns really has set in. Also, though there are some grins and smiles along the long and winding road that leads to the cinema exit 135 minutes later, it is not a comedy, and that turns out to be a shame.
It is actually a save the planet lecture and cheesy romance, when Safranek meets the one-legged Vietnamese survivor Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau). The actress tries hard to let charm burst through her strident character so that we can see why Damon falls for her, but it doesn’t happen.
Meanwhile, alas, nobody told Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier that it is not a comedy, so they play for laughs, and they are quite bad, really quite bad. What they and their characters are quite doing in this movie, apart from contributing to the enormous running time, is anyone’s guess. Waltz and Kier are normally very welcome, but not really here, sorry guys.
Rolf Lassgård (so good in A Man Called Ove [2015]) and Ingjerd Egeberg, as Dr Jorgen Asbjørnsen, the inventor of shrinking and his wife, are in an entirely different movie – the ecological one. Their movie is interesting, serious and rather dull, sorry to say.

Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig in Downsizing.

It’s hard to be so negative about Downsizing because, like its hero, it means so darned well it hurts. It has got a big heart but it comes over as a small, mediocre movie, and all the also always welcome Damon’s efforts to spark, sparkle, charm, involve, whatever, go for very little. Alexander Payne has to take the blame, along with his co-writer Jim Taylor. I’m very sad about this because he made Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002),
Sideways (2004) and Nebraska (2013).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review 

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

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