REVIEW - CHARLIE COUNTRYMAN

It was possibly only a mere matter of time before someone wrote a script on the same wavelength of hysterical earnestness that Shia LaBeouf rides on with each new role. I'll willingly own up to the fact that LaBeouf's technique often works for me, as aggravating as I might find it, but still, there it is, I find it aggravating, and I wish he'd stop it. It's tolerable in more nuanced projects, but it's intolerable in Charlie Countryman, as almost everything else about this execrable film is also. Juvenile indie emo-pop noir, with tradition-dictated quotas of action and comedy, both ostensibly met, and a through-line of romance, which meshes ideally with the film's overactive emotional cortex. It's one of those romances where the two individuals meet under testing circumstances and we're supposed to accept that they're destined to be together just because. Evan Rachel Wood specialises in playing mopes like Gabby, intended as a contemporary spin on the femme fatale, but with a laughable accent and a complete lack of effort, she crafts one of the year's dullest characters. She and LaBeouf, hamming it up like never before, could hardly be more mismatched. Matt Drake's plot makes a point of being predictable, I think because it aims for classic tragedy with a self-conscious twist; it and Fredrik Bond's trite direction are comically adolescent, in their fervent quest for edge and originality in a neon-lit Eastern-European underworld. Broad comedy (and broad everything, actually) just gets in their way. They don't seem to notice. This insistence on the radical bravura they think they're displaying only goes so far though, as they pussy out (quite literally) of genuinely pushing the envelopes they so clumsily toy with. I've seen few films, if any, so certain of their own profundity, and equally few so thoroughly lacking in it.