Director: Peter Landesman
Score: 4/10
Is This The Real Life? I Wish It Was Fantasy
You know something; maybe I was too harsh on The Imitation Game. For all the little ways (and big ways) it played fast and loose with the truth of the history, at least it was an entertaining movie. Thankfully, there are movies like Concussion to show us why we have fiction in the first place.
Concussion is the story of Ugandan-born physician Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who is a forensic pathologist. He is quirky (in that Hollywood sense of “we need him to be quirky so give him a strange trait”) because he talks to his dead patients. He is misunderstood, especially by his co-workers, who think he wastes time and doesn’t just do the job as written. And he doesn’t play by the rules, because he follows his gut and digs beneath the surface to find the true cause of death. Frankly, it’s absurd and so trite it almost hurts to see. In ten minutes of intro, the movie hits so many cliches with Omalu’s character that you can almost see the associate producer standing off-set with a checklist. In any case, Omalu ends up trying to solve the mystery of a former football star’s self-destructive death, and ends up uncovering what we all now know as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (that thing the NFL got sued over a little while back). The story is largely true, but that’s sort of the point of this review, and why this movie seems to have a disconnect with cinema itself.
Reality is frequently bizarre, unbelievable, and outlandish—and doubly so when sports are involved. The extraordinary become commonplace around sporting events, which is why we never give up on our teams. But for all the twists and turns, reality generally isn’t very good at making stories. All those best experiences you remember from your childhood pale in comparison when told back to someone else. This is why so much of historically-based cinema is embellished (if not outright fabricated). We expect certain things in our stories; tropes are used time and time again because we recognize them, and because we understand their place (and our own places) in the story when they are used. The 2nd Act Swerve, the Heel-Face Turn, and the Noble Sacrifice all make for great storytelling, even if they’re unrealistic to expect in our actual lives.
To make a historically-accurate movie work, you have to be a good director and a good writer. It’s a balancing act. It’s very easy to skew too far towards entertainment or accuracy, and many a good story idea has been lost to poor execution. Concussion is an adaptation of a story that’s good, but it’s not interesting, and that’s a pretty grievous sin to commit in a movie. Sure, Will Smith’s acting isn’t bad by any stretch (not Oscar-worthy though, sorry social justice crowd), but there’s just so little to work with. All the drama is forced (mostly by the overbearing soundtrack), and all the tense periods are so blatantly invented and forcefully inserted they stand out like a children’s nativity play. The whole movie feels like a series of ten-minute-long scenes all cut up and pasted together with no sense of flow, and in the end I’m left with a movie that makes me care so little about the characters that I feel like any scene involving Omalu not in someone’s office is an utter waste of time. I just don’t care that you found a girl, I don’t care that you’re married now; I just want you to get on with remembering what the movie is supposed to be about (and let’s be honest, 97% of that story is literally just people standing around and talking, and that does not good cinema make).
Concussion is one of the worst kinds of movies to review, mostly because that means I had to sit through all of it. It’s not awful, but it’s not good. It’s completely blown away by the likes of The Big Short, simply because that movie makes us care about its impact. Concussion is just lukewarm, watered-down, and flavorless. It’s a bowl of tepid oatmeal, and it’s all the more unpalatable for how completely bland it is.
If this is real life, I prefer to stay in the fantasy world, thanks.
Acting: 6
Story: 3
Visuals: 5
Sound: 4
Enjoyment: 4
Overall Score: 4/10
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