I don’t know what to say about The Nines. I’m not even sure whether I liked it or not. Theresa and I watched it this after­noon, and It was going well right up until the end. Then I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

I apol­o­gize in advance, but in order to review this movie, there are going to be spoilers.

The Nines is a 3-story story about Gary/Gavin/Gabe - “G” from here on in - who are all por­trayed by Ryan Reynolds. The sto­ries seem to be roughly fitted around each other (the first two far more than the last) and as they unfold they have the repeat­ing themes of “intro, progress, get weird, get meta-​physical, world-end” which was cool the first time, and then it just got taxing. From what I gath­ered the whole thing revolves around “G” and he recre­ates his uni­verse repeatedly.

I want to say that John August pulled off some really cool meta-​physical shit in this one. I want to but I can’t. To be honest they went so left field with the ending that I just couldn’t take it in. At first I fig­ured it out as a “dude has mul­ti­ple avatars in Real Life” sort of deal. This thought process makes sense right up until the very end when it is revealed that “G” is actu­ally sim­i­lar to Q from Star Trek. He cre­ates and re-​creates the world on a whim, but got so involved that he forgot that he was even doing it. So I guess you could say that if Q was addicted to Real Life - Or Jesus being addicted to World of War­craft -, it would be some­thing like this.

I liked what they were trying to do by putting the sto­ries in a loose sort of con­nected mesh. They didn’t pull it off all that well though, which is the real shame. Too much of it felt jumpy or almost B-Movie. The reuse of the same actors in dif­fer­ent roles was a nice touch to help in the attempted vision, but in the end it falls short of the goal. Hope Davis could have been removed from the movie as she con­tributed very little and felt like a weak char­ac­ter over­all. It feels almost as they threw her in because they needed some char­ac­ter to fill in the creepy gaps that were left.

The acting in the movie were fairly strong through­out the movie, which is good because with­out it this movie would have com­pletely failed. Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy do their jobs fan­tas­ti­cally and manage to repeat­edly prove that there was a con­nec­tion between both the char­ac­ters (in all of their incar­na­tions) as well as the actors. It made for some great dialogs between the two, and helped the movie immensely.

The music in this movie really impressed me. The main theme is a haunt­ing piano tune that comes up through­out the entire film. It’s a subtle addi­tion and helps bring mood to a lot of scenes that would have been empty with­out it. I’m going to try and find a copy of the sound­track as soon as pos­si­ble and listen the crap out of it.

Rent it, I guess. I wasn’t very impressed with it, but I wasn’t unim­pressed either. I felt it was a bit jar­ring with it’s move­ments, and the ending came too far out of left field for me to appre­ci­ate. I under­stood it, but I didn’t think it fit. It was very deus ex machina, and that bugged me.

5/10