This weekend the never-ending Quest for Quality Home Viewing lead me to a Netflix nugget called the Last Thing He Wanted. While the Last Thing He Wanted boasts a hilariously discouraging five (5) percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it stars Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Anne Hathaway, both of whom I adore. How bad could it be? Well...
Spoiler level here will be mild-ish.
Hathaway portrays Elena McMahon, a journalist who, thanks to her no-good father, gets mixed up in her own story about Central American arms dealing.
The Last Thing He Wanted has many moving pieces. SO many moving pieces. Rather than shifting them craftily around a chess-board of a film, the movie throws them in the air a-la 52 Pickup. I'm not sure they all come down. Players move in and out of frame — revealing and concealing motives — as the picture's various paths attempt to converge on one cohesive road. Hathaway does a good job in the lead. Some of her dialogue is clunky, but she's a bit of a bright spot in a movie that has few enough. A weirdly-shiny Affleck "enjoys" less screen time, and certainly does less with it. His character is pretty obvious, so most or even all of that may not be his fault. The picture boasts an impressive list of supporting talent, including Willem Dafoe, Rosie Perez, Edi Gathegi, and the always wonderful Toby Jones. As terrifying as McMahon's trip down the rabbit hole is, the Last Thing He Wanted never sustains much tension, as most of the characters prove to be exactly what you suspect they are from the first time you see them. A political thriller like this obviously features its share of violence, and one particularly disturbing scene will bother me long after I've forgotten the rest. I am here to warn you, this movie offers you nothing that's worth having this image in your head forever. Having said ALL of that, I didn't hate the Last Thing He Wanted. I didn't hate it right up to the last minute...when it did exactly what I knew it was going to do from the first minute. Then I hated it.
The Last Thing He Wanted runs 115 minutes and is rated R for "language, some violence, disturbing images, and brief nudity."
At risk of stealing a phrase I feel certain already must have been used to describe this movie, the Last Thing He Wanted truly is the last thing any of us wanted. (But Anne and Ben, I still love you and will always watch whatever you do!) Of a possible nine Weasleys, the Last Thing He Wanted gets two.
Until next time, dear reader(s), I hope you all are staying safe and sane as this crisis drags on, and I hope to see you at the cinema very soon!
