Ronald Hugh Morrison's novel 'Predicament' is a black comedy, a coming of age yarn of carnal knowledge (involving a schoolgirl), blackmail and murder. Set in the New Zealand in the '30s, the novel is infused with small-town seediness and repressed sexuality. Director/writer Jason Stutter shies away from this, neutering the story into inoffensive blandness, that feels closer to 'The Goonies' than 'Chinatown'.
Stutter didn't exactly win the audience over at the gala premiere at the NZ Film Festival when he stated that he doesn't read much because he '...can watch forty films in the time it takes to finish a novel'. Still, adapting local literature has always been the easiest path for the venal to glean a few million dollars out of various funding bodies (did anyone pay to see the undercooked turkey that was last year's adaptation of 'Under the Mountain?). Watching 'Predicament', its obvious that he has no affinity for the material. Thus, his choice for his first 'real feature' gives off the stench of being merely a stepping-stone on his career path.
The film is another ho-hum example of simply watching a storyboard filmed. It's a tedious sequence of badly sketched characters bounded in boxes. It highlights all the hallmarks of an amateur with delusions of auterism. "Predicament' is a catalogue of all the laziest contemporary tricks-of-the-trade; from the pointless Cinema-scope lensing (why? because Tarantino always frames in it, of course!), the constant camera movement (crane swoops down at the drop of a hat) and the bland, yet ever-present score (Plan 9 trot out trombones and xylophones), its the hollow artifice of stale technique trouncing the audience to not fall asleep. Never once, throughout all this visual Sturm and Drang does the story connect with its audience.
Stutter utterly fails to convey a sense of time and place. He's so disinterested in the morals of the era and the vernacular of time, that at one point a character utters "You better harden the f*** up!". Its a cringe-inducing tip of the hat to the Guy Ritchie school, but not nearly so tragic as an earlier 'homage' (groan!) to 'Reservoir Dogs'. For Stutter, cinema was born in the 1980's. He's a total square, and like so many of his peers, actually stepping outside of the square is not a career option.
The director is a 20-something prude. His screenplay performs a literal vasectomy upon the novel. Here is a writer so bereft of balls, that he visualises a sex scene as a pair of female legs kicking the air... replete with off-screen moaning. The material needs a Verhoven, not a shrinking violet virgin. Here is so milquetoast a director, that he climaxes an off-screen decapitation by...tracking into the screaming mouth of the woman who witnessed it. Being hackeneyed is too good for this hack .
The worst is saved for last. The novel's climax is a frittered affair, but consulting his preferred bed-side reading tome, (screen-writing guru Syd Field's bible on How-To-Construct-a-Screenplay, perchance?), Stutter- the writer who doesn't read much, 'ties up all the threads' and achieves 'resolution' in the most trite fashion (as dictated by Field's soulless formulae of cliché). It's risible, and how wretched it is, to suffer through the dull spectacle of a director ticking off a check-list -('turning point'-Tick!...) when all one wanted was a for story to unfold or to be mildly entertained. Watching this adaptation is like paying to watch an illiterate spitting on Morrison's grave.
..after the polite applause died off, (which was well before the kowtowing "Extra Special Thanks to Sir. Peter Jackson..." credit), the audience shuffled out. At these events, the standard response mustered from the unimpressed is a tactful "Well, it wasn't TOO bad...". Yet, after 'Predicament', not a single person I spoke to had anything positive to say. The consensus was that the film never connected, the actors never stood a chance, their characters never came to life on-screen.
I predict box office death for this cynically produced, misguided mess.
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