The Nines (2007)
April 28, 2008
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
Categories: Movie Reviews
Tagged under: 5/10 movie reviews, Hope Davis, John August, Mellisa McCarthy, Ryan Reynolds, The Nines