100 MOVIES IN A YEAR: N/A Passengers & We Own The Night

Anyone who has seen the way that I live will attest to my being able to sit through some true garbage. Also, I am moderately good at being able to tell in advance what kind of entertainment will appeal to me, so it’s pretty impressive when a movie manages to get me to bail early. Passengers did it by taking an incredibly interesting premise (waking up alone, over a lifetime before everyone else, adrift in space on a ship that was meant to take you to a new colony) and turns into an incredibly boring/unintentionally disturbing love story/boring race against the clock thriller. The leads have no chemistry, Jennifer Lawrence once again plays a role that she seems at least a decade too young for, and Christ Pratt reaffirms yet again that he’s an incredibly uncompelling “serious” leading man.
And how do I know everything that happened in the movie if I didn’t finish it? I read the Wikipedia synopsis, as I always do to further punish myself after bailing on a boring movie.
In a stark contrast to Passengers, We Own The Night takes a maddeningly boring and typical plot about the police and divided family loyalties, and then executes it as boringly as possible. As the world’s greatest uncompelling “serious” leading man, Mark Wahlberg is as dull as possible in comparison to Joaquin Phoenix, who at least manages a good performance and chemistry with Eva Mendes. This movie had an uphill battle with me in the first place, since I couldn’t be less fucking interested in portrayals of the police as being a well-meaning force for good, and in the face of those overwhelming odds against success it didn’t even try to get me. The 70’s are over, and also made a much more concerted effort to make these movies morally ambiguous, anyway. Stop making them.
