Friday, March 29, 2024

Movie Review: ‘The Desperate Hour’ Is Yet Another Senseless and Exploitative Film from Phillip Noyce


Director: Phillip Noyce

Writers: Chris Sparling

Stars: Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Andrew Chown, Sierra Maltby

Synopsis: A mother desperately races against time to save her child as authorities place her small town on lockdown.


Director Phillip Noyce is now two for two in making horribly exploitative and misguided films. After the horrible Above Suspicion, he returns with The Desperate Hour (previously titled Lakewood when it premiered at TIFF), and the end result is even more senseless than his previous film. Even Naomi Watts can’t save the movie by running around desperately (heh) trying to reach her son. 

The movie follows a fairly linear plot. On the eve of the anniversary of her husband’s death, Amy Carr (Watts) decides to take a personal day. She goes for a morning run, in the hopes to clear her mind, while her son (Colton Gobbo) stays in bed. Suddenly, the police place all schools on total lockdown, as reports of a shooter infiltrating a school start to appear. In the middle of the woods, Amy must now run to the schools in the hopes of finding her son, who is trapped in a room with the shooter. 

Running at only 84 minutes, the movie takes no time in getting things going. The only good thing I can say about The Desperate Hour is how taut everything is; it gets straight to the action and wastes no time in going from point A to point B. Naomi Watts also anchors the movie with a somewhat decent performance. You can feel the tension when a cacophony of ringtones and phone calls multiplies, while she is trying to make it to her son’s school, far away from where she is. 

It’s unfortunate that screenwriter Chris Sparling and Noyce bog down Watts’ performance through repetitive situations in which she runs, stops to catch her breath, falls down, limps, runs again, falls down once more, limps, and runs again. And it follows the same structure without fail. When more calls reach her phone and she can’t discern what’s going on, she will fall down. And when things have calmed down, or a crucial bit of information is transmitted; she’s going to run, even if seriously injured. And it’ll never change that structure, to try and surprise moviegoers. Exactly like clockwork. 

 

Now to talk about the more exploitative aspects of the film requires spoiling some of its plot points, so if you want to go into The Desperate Hour without knowing much, you should stop reading now. 

 

But for those that do want to know why the film is so misguided, here it is. Noyce uses the school shooting aspect to draw a parallel on Amy’s bad parenting skills, and also manipulates the audience, for about twenty minutes, into thinking that Amy’s son is the shooter. Scratch that, the entire film is incredibly manipulative. For about forty minutes, the movie will make audiences believe that it’s due to Amy’s negligence as a parent that her son went to school in the first place. That can easily be forgiven if the rest of the film is gripping enough, but what comes after is even worse. 

A police detective contacts Amy and interrogates him on her son’s behavior, asking him directly if he had access to any guns, and if he takes specific medication. That’s right, the movie wants the audience to believe that Amy’s son is the shooter (even though he isn’t). And they will make the audience believe the same thing for over twenty minutes, as Amy scrambles further to try and get to her son. These moments are exploitative for two reasons. Firstly, and most obviously,her son isn’t the shooter. He never was, and the fact that the film goes to serious lengths in trying to make the audience believe that it’s him is truly repugnant. Secondly, it’s not Amy’s fault that her son went to school. She left for a run to clear her head, her son went to school thinking it would be a normal day. Simple as that. 

But the movie wants us to believe that it’s Amy’s fault so she can have a redemption arc during the film’s final act in which she directly confronts the shooter (Andrew Chown) on the phone and inadvertently saves her son. And it’s in that moment that I completely checked out of the movie, which exploits victims of gun violence as a backdrop for a “pulse-pounding thriller” and uses them as pawns for the “irresponsible mother” to become the hero of the story, especially after being manipulated by the police into believing that her son is the shooter. 

The Desperate Hour seems to have admirable intentions to talk about the effects of a school shooting on a parent, but its misguided script, the senseless exploitation of real school shooting victims to redeem Naomi Watts’ character automatically makes it one of the worst movies of the year and one to never watch, even if it’ll be on cable in a year or two. Phillip Noyce should stop finding manipulative films like these and go back to directing another Jack Ryan film. Now that would be incredible. 

 

Grade: D-

 

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