THB #837: Passenger
Don’t go.
That’s pretty much my review. Let me add…
André Øvredal didn’t help himself… but he won’t take the blame for this mess. The actors are doing their best… none will come away with anyone’s enthusiasm, but this car wreck will not likely hurt their careers. I never understood why there were people saying terrible things about Walter Hamada, formerly of WB and DC… a producer here, he is not making a good argument for himself. Gary Dauberman is a screenwriter with a nice history who sometimes produces… just a producer here.
But it is the screenplay, above and beyond, that is the most horrifying thing about this movie. I’m pretty sure there was a lot of re-cutting of this film from the early cuts to the release cut, just 94 minutes, and so paper-thin that doilies beat it up in the schoolyard. I won’t name the screenwriters here because I don’t believe in punching down… or in this case, mocking the near-dead bleeding out on the side of the industry road. (Watch them have a huge hit in 3 years…. show business!)
It steals freely from a range of films from It Follows (without the logic) to Bad Boys 2 (slightly less disgusting) without ever offering a payoff befitting its predecessors. The great and under-used-these-days Melissa Leo gets to play the wary elder usually played by a male character actor… and you will love how they kept her workload down to 2 days.
Roger Ebert loved to talk about how for some horror movies to continue on, characters had to do incredibly dumb things. This is the kind of movie in which the “hero couple,” warned to not drive at night and to never stop proceeds to drive and night at to stop multiple times after that clear warning… after they have seen the supernatural villain… so they completely understand the stakes and keep doing the same stupid shit.
This is a movie in which a tire blows out, forcing out couple to stop, after which the male removes the tire, the woman wanders away insanely, the man gets under the van (you can tell what is going to happen with the man and the van from those 5 words alone without even knowing how the movie works) to retrieve the nuts to secure the replacement tire (which we never even see), and then, once he escapes the van with relatively minor injury and she escapes her moronic wandering into danger, he and she jump into the van and drive away, never having put the invisible replacement tire on the car. (I’m sure the editors tried to fix this and couldn’t… one of the many, “they won’t notice” moments in this clusterfilm.)
This is a movie in which the couple is trying to drive during daylight and then all of a sudden they both fall asleep while driving and wake up to it being the dead of night. "How did it become night?” “I don’t know.” GENIUS!
I don’t like the Terrifier movies or the Human Centipede movies, because they are disgusting and misogynistic and like slowing down to watch a very bloody bus wreck then pulling over and laughing at the dead bodies. But that is a matter of personal taste. Both movies and their sequels have something that Passenger does not have… a clear idea that can be followed (however unpleasant).
I am guessing that there was a clear idea in the screenplay when it was presented to these producers and the studio. It’s basically, “Beautiful couple with some bad history in their past decide to give up their nice city lives (they move out of a $4000 a month apartment early on and go to see the world in their Mercedes van, which is not unusual in Europe, but it $80k+ in America) and run into a supernatural rage being that looks like a combo of the Terrifier guy, Angus Scrimm in Phantasm, and Nick Cage’s Longlegs tortures and kills people who stop their cars on rural roads late at night.”
The villain probably had a reason for doing what he does at some point. There were probably some rules about what the being is capable of and not capable of (sometimes, it seems he can fly… sometimes, he seems completely vulnerable to gravity and a bat). And there was probably a cut 20 minutes longer that made more sense, but was even more painfully boring.
What we get, as an audience, is a movie in which the characters act illogically, the villain is ill-defined, and the only real tension in the film is jump scares. The memories of other movies in nearby genres are apparent… and so badly referenced that it almost becomes outright mockery.
But enough with this breathtaking turd of a film. May everyone connected forget the pain and may the industry allow them a chance for redemption, because no one can make something this bad intentionally.
What I want to point out, as I have a few times in the last months, is the Paramount release plan.
I was not in an empty theater in the first screening (2p) today here in Los Angeles. I’d say the theater was 20% full… which is pretty good under the circumstances. About double the weekday crowd I saw the really compelling Is God Is with last week.
The film had its trailer showing in IMAX theaters only, not online, in December/January. They finally dated the movie in January. And they only released the trailer a month go.
In other words, they spent nothing on marketing, avoiding showing it to almost everyone, and hoped that the film would somehow get the cache’ of a horror film from Neon or A24 or one of the non-major surprises like Terrifier 3. And we will see how it does over this holiday weekend. Whatever amount it scores, it is more than it deserves.
Also involved with the studio releasing this steaming pile of worthlessness is the promise David Ellison made to release 15 films this year. This, with almost no marketing spend, is one of them. It counts… unlike the Top Gun re-releases. So it served that end. By releasing it, the movie’s post-theatrical value is increased and with a tiny marketing budget, they are not flushing 8 figures more into oblivion.
So it’s smart.
It’s also abusive.
I guarantee you that they know over on Melrose. I can hear the meeting after the screening…
“Wow…. that was really horrible.”
”Was it? I slept through most of it.”
”Can we just force it onto Paramount+?”
”No. New Boss needs 15 releases.”
”They always blame the marketing department… hate that!”
”But I have an idea… let’s go Longlegs…”
”What’s Longlegs?”
”That Nic Cage thing that they made a fortune on.”
”You mean National Treasure?”
”No. Keep up. That thing with the funny make-up.”
”Oh… he won Best Supporting Actress, right?”
”Oy.”
Someone’s going to be angry at that… but I actually respect marketing teams and am playing with some stereotypes there. But my main point is, someone came up with this idea and it was really smart. Spend nothing and hope that people sucker themselves into showing up. And the execution of keeping it out of view has worked about as well as it can, unless they had something that is actually really interesting for the target audience.
I went to the movies hoping the film would be better than I expected… which was true of Longlegs for me. Not my favorite, but I get the appeal. Likewise, Terrifier 3. I didn’t see Markiplier’s film and he made that happen in his own, without a studio team behind him, making it all the more unique and impressive.
Finally… NO! This film is not so bad that it’s fun. It could, in a few years, be worthy of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. I mean, I had to restrain myself (failed a couple of times) from speaking the dialogue before it was spoken on screen. And again, they keep doing things that they know they must not do… and time after time, they evade death when they should, in movie logic, die… even though they are a really beautiful couple whose marriage will lead to a kind and divorce by the time the kid is 3. But if there is a God, there will not be a sequel so we can find out.
Until tomorrow…