Film Review - Suburbicon (2017)

Suburbicon is co-written and directed by George Clooney and concerns Matt Damon as an office worker whose home is broken into and his wife (Julianne Moore) is killed but meanwhile a black family moves into their neighbourhood and chaos ensues.

This movie is frankly awful and not unlike the Snowman from last month I cannot believe that this many highly talented people are involved in a gigantic mess of a film which is that way for these reasons:

- Firstly it is now crystal clear that Clooney hasn’t a fucking clue how to properly execute a script on film and it isn’t just with this movie it was also with the Monuments Men from 2014 the story here feels all over the place and Clooney just cannot make all of these elements come together in a harmonious fashion.

But a movie he produced did that beautifully and that was Argo a script by Chris Terrio that easily could have been a mess but Ben Affleck made sing like a hummingbird and it won Best Picture and whenever I watch that movie I think “How the Fuck did he pull this off” and I can’t help but think that Clooney felt “Pfft Show Off I’ll show him that I can do it too” and well twice now he has shown that he cannot do it at all which means this soufflé should be thrown out in the trash.

- Secondly the script by Clooney, Grant Heslov and the Coen Brothers (to be fair they themselves have been hit and miss for me) is a real mess I mean here you have a fascinating story of the first black family moving into a prominently white suburb and it’s the Fucking side act of a really boring story about the mob being owed money and insurance fraud and riots and none of it did anything for me at all as the humour wasn’t funny and the racial stuff is not given the story thrust it should have gotten as it could have been an interesting reflection on contemporary times but it’s just thrown in there.

- And lastly the performances here are dreadful, Damon is incredibly flat and during the home invasion I wanted him to just take the glasses off, turn into Jason Bourne and beat the shit out of them, Moore is really cartoonish here as both the wife and the Sister in Law and it feels worse here than her turn in Kingsman 2 as at least that film was a more cartoonish movie here it really feels out of place given the seriousness of the film itself.

But the biggest waste is of Oscar Isaac as he is barely in this film (really only 2 scenes) and when he is in the film you think “Even he can’t save this movie” and when that happens you are in deep deep trouble as this man can lift pretty much every movie he’s in up another notch he’s that good of an actor but yeah this is a rare exception to that role and I really liked him as Apocalypse last year and that’s saying something.

But that was Suburbicon and it is awful on almost every key level, the direction, script and performances are all over the place and have no unifying tone to them and I don’t want to recommend it to anyone, 1 out of 5.