Director: Ti West
Writer: Ti West
Stars: Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
Synopsis: In 1980s Los Angeles, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.
To catch lightning in a bottle is something of a curse these days, especially in Hollywood. Once you make a hit, the expectation is that you can (and will) make another. Sometimes, the most ambitious studios – filmmakers, too – find themselves wondering, “Hey, why not another on top of the first another?”, and as a result, audiences are left with a litany of “anothers”, none of which live up to the first. As if they should have been expected to in the first place.
The problem for Ti West is that he caught lightning in a bottle twice in a single year. In March of 2022, A24 released X, West’s first feature in six years to that date, to critical adoration. Shot for a modest $1 million in New Zealand, X was a killer take on gender roles in horror films with a porno production as its backdrop. It was an early post-pandemic hit, grossing $15 million, and though it starred big-adjacent talents like Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, and Martin Henderson, its success was half-dependent on A24’s credo as an outfit for quality horror offerings, half-dependent on word-of-mouth advertising.
September of 2022 brought West’s second bolt in the form of Pearl, a prequel to X that was filmed “in secret”, nevermind that the studio greenlit West’s franchise ahead of time (“Shot in secret” sounds better, anyway.). Co-written with Goth, Pearl told the origin story of the old ax-wielding woman from X, whom Goth portrayed in addition to Maxine Minx, the original film’s heroine. Pearl charts the titular farm gal’s descent into murderous madness as her dreams of becoming a movie star crumble due to her hilarious lack of stage presence. She can’t sing, nor can she really dance – even if it’s funny to watch her try – but boy, could she chop a dude up in the back of a barn. She could also bring in a hair more than 10-times her $1 million budget; all the more reason for West to make another.
Enter MaXXXine, the trilogy’s biggest and starriest entry, a tale of one woman’s desire for fame and her relative willingness to do anything in order to get it. Its opening epigraph, courtesy of Bette Davis, reads, “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star,” a theory Goth’s Maxine is willing to test the limits of en route to celebrity status. MaXXXine takes place in 1980s Hollywood, and its titular leading lady is itching to make a name for herself beyond the limits of the adult film industry. She may not be considered hot stuff to Tinseltown’s powers that be just yet, but if faking it until you make it were a screen test, there would be no round of callbacks; the part would be hers.
Yet when she auditions for The Puritan II, a nun-sploitation horror sequel with the up-and-coming director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) tapped as its helmer, Maxine confidently asserts that she needs no cue cards to guide her through the producer’s scene of choice and subsequently nails it, shrugging off her performative anguish as if it’s just another day at the office. Impressed, Bender and co. thank her for her time. Maxine then bids farewell to her audience of three, struts into the California sunshine and past a line of equally-desperate aspiring actresses towards her convertible, and beelines for her convertible, naturally marked with a vanity plate boasting her name. As if already in the spotlight, she hollers at her fellow wannabes, “Y’all might as well go home, ‘cause I just fuckin’ nailed that.”
To that end, the third go-round for West’s collaboration with Goth posits itself as a solid extension of X and Pearl’s thematic ideas. But given that MaXXXine is meant to serve as this de facto series’ big finale, it makes sure to cram in as many noticeable nods as possible into the fray, almost as if it’s trying to legitimize itself as it hurtles its way through an over-extended conceit in what, to this point, had been a straightforward and successfully invariant collection of genre pictures. Since Maxine is shooting a horror movie in Los Angeles, we’re treated to a number of familiar sites as she trots around the Universal Studios backlot, with the Bates Motel receiving special treatment. These bits of horror fan-service might manage to scratch an itch if they weren’t all-but immediately followed by lines that sound like, “This is where they shot the movie Psycho, which is a movie about a psycho.”
And because MaXXXine is set in Sin City, 1985, it feels the need to infuse the real-life tale of the Night Stalker’s murderous spree as its pinpointed milieu. West incorporates authentic newsreels from the time, not to mention his characters’ constant referencing of the very-scary serial killer that is still on the loose, so as to center his audience in a time frame it easily could have deduced from the hair, the clothes, the cars, the soundtrack, the smoking indoors, and the city’s general vibe and appearance. I, for one, would have been pleased to have played a guessing game of my own after being assaulted by the massive technicolor “1985” title card that drops minutes into the movie, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The issue, though, is that West doesn’t choose, either. Not how many times he wants to remind us that this is L.A., and it is, indeed, the ‘80s, for one, but he also doesn’t seem to know what movie he wants to make. What starts as a story about a starlet setting out to make her cinematic dreams come true despite horror lurking around every corner later introduces Maxine’s deep-seated trauma from both her religious upbringing and the Texas porn star massacre her character narrowly survived in X. On top of that, while attempting to navigate her starring turn in what Debicki’s director calls “a ‘B’ movie with ‘A’ ideas”, Maxine must also deal with a private detective (Kevin Bacon) who has been hired by a shadowy figure to follow Maxine’s every move and terrorizes her on the daily, thus impacting her ability to shoot The Puritan II’s dailies; the mysterious disappearances/deaths of multiple friends that two unrelated detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) are convinced she has something to do with or knows something about; and the lingering possibility that she may be the Night Stalker’s next victim. Quite the week for Maxine. And it’s only Wednesday.
Lost yet? Don’t be. It’s not all that confusing to follow, but it is a bit distracting and unnecessary for a film that has all of its ingredients so clearly outlined on the label. MaXXXine’s ambition, while admirable, results in the deterioration of a pitch-perfect recipe into a cluttered mess of mishegoss and movie stars all struggling for screen time in a film that goes to desperate lengths to reassure us that Goth is its star while hoping that everyone else who’s ever acted in Hollywood can steal the show, too. Beyond Goth, Debicki, and the smattering of other aforementioned actors who pop up throughout, MaXXXine’s ensemble cast includes Moses Sumney as Leon, Maxine’s best friend; Halsey as Tabby Martin, Maxine’s fellow porn star pal; Lily Collins, who plays an actress from the Puritan films; and Giancarlo Esposito as Teddy Knight, Esq., Maxine’s agent. Thankfully, both Esposito and Bacon seem to have been given free rein to chew on the scenery with aplomb; audiences have been clamoring for Esposito to break free of his recent straight-man-in-the-suit typecastings, and he does so to new heights here, while Bacon almost certainly showed up on set for two days, decided he was going to do an accent – think Foghorn Leghorn by way of Jake Gittes, bandaged nose and all – and had the time of his life. But everyone else, no matter how long they manage to stick around, feels disposable. Monaghan and Cannavale seem to have a fair bit of good-cop-bad-cop chemistry, but their collective presence is intermittent at best, never leaving them the opportunity to gel on screen for much more than a few chuckles.
Perhaps that’s a plus for Maxine (and Goth). As she puts it, she can handle herself. (“So said every dead girl in Hollywood,” Halsey’s Tabby replies in one of MaXXXine’s many snippets of stale dialogue.) And in the past, such claims have been true; after all, Maxine survived X and Goth turned Pearl’s Pearl into an icon. But as the scale has been upped and the budget, inflated – an exact number has yet to be reported, but one look at this cast and one listen to the soundtrack provides enough hints for any amateur P.I. to solve the case – the charm that fueled West’s first two X film seems to have gone by the wayside in favor of flimsy flair. There’s enough pure entertainment and filmmaking gravitas on display here to inspire yet another trip back to the Maxine Minx well, but as a narrative exercise, it feels strained, like West and his studio got high on their own supply, proceeded to chuck mounds of ideas (and stars) at the wall, and didn’t bother to wait to see what stuck before picking it all up and throwing it in the movie regardless of its adhesion. Maxine Minx may be a movie star, but she deserves a better movie than MaXXXine to serve as her big break.
