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Film Review: Miss Nobody
More of a rant than a review - but you should probably have expected that.
This is billed as a black comedy. "Plucky paper pusher Sarah Jane McKinney lands a great promotion after innocently killing her boss, and soon she's employing her talent for treachery to scale the Judge Pharmaceuticals ladder."
Okay, sounds decent. Satirizing corporate politics by bumping people off to get promotions. That's got potential and it's how the trailer was constructed. Except... in far-too-typical American fashion, the film can't make up its mind. When your main character is a serial murderer you generally succeed by committing completely - especially when she constantly breaks the fourth wall. Either make the protagonist a full villain with whom the audience can be complicit and take glee in the villainy (Richard III, one of the most-produced Shakespeare plays for that reason).
Or, fully embrace the comedy aspect of it all and go for satire. Compare to Keeping Mum, a somewhat similarly-themed British black comedy. The killer is Maggie Smith, playing off Kristin Scott Thomas and Rowan Atkinson. Innocent bodies pile up but it's done with aplomb and laughs. You like the characters even as they kill people for trivial reasons.
Instead: Miss Nobody takes great care to demonstrate how all the victims are sleazebags who "deserve" to die (sexual harasser, drug addict, deviant, etc). Presumably this was added to "make the heroine more appealing", because "audiences need to sympathize with her". Neither fish nor fowl, and so ultimately unsuccessful in its target niche.
Not a waste of 90 minutes, but not a film I'm happy to have seen. I may have chuckled a couple of times. When we watched Keeping Mum a year ago, I chortled constantly.
This is billed as a black comedy. "Plucky paper pusher Sarah Jane McKinney lands a great promotion after innocently killing her boss, and soon she's employing her talent for treachery to scale the Judge Pharmaceuticals ladder."
Okay, sounds decent. Satirizing corporate politics by bumping people off to get promotions. That's got potential and it's how the trailer was constructed. Except... in far-too-typical American fashion, the film can't make up its mind. When your main character is a serial murderer you generally succeed by committing completely - especially when she constantly breaks the fourth wall. Either make the protagonist a full villain with whom the audience can be complicit and take glee in the villainy (Richard III, one of the most-produced Shakespeare plays for that reason).
Or, fully embrace the comedy aspect of it all and go for satire. Compare to Keeping Mum, a somewhat similarly-themed British black comedy. The killer is Maggie Smith, playing off Kristin Scott Thomas and Rowan Atkinson. Innocent bodies pile up but it's done with aplomb and laughs. You like the characters even as they kill people for trivial reasons.
Instead: Miss Nobody takes great care to demonstrate how all the victims are sleazebags who "deserve" to die (sexual harasser, drug addict, deviant, etc). Presumably this was added to "make the heroine more appealing", because "audiences need to sympathize with her". Neither fish nor fowl, and so ultimately unsuccessful in its target niche.
Not a waste of 90 minutes, but not a film I'm happy to have seen. I may have chuckled a couple of times. When we watched Keeping Mum a year ago, I chortled constantly.