Beast of Burden
Premise –
Sean Haggerty is secretly a drug mule pilot, smuggling cocaine across the
Mexico/US border to receive payments for his wife’s medical treatment. On his
final drug run, he attempts to receive his biggest payment yet, secretly
feeding the information to the US government in exchange for a new life.
However, the Mexican cartel he works for suspects that Sean can no longer be
trusted and take action to watch his every move.
- - It was going to rank at about 15/100
- -As much as I love Daniel Radcliffe’s
acting, this was going to be his worst performance, and he would be drastically
outshined by Grace Gummer
-
-The script would be overall terrible
- -I would never want to watch it again, just
the once for consistency.
All of this I attribute to the godawful trailer. I
swear, the trailer for this movie was one of the worst-edited I had ever seen.
I ended up enjoying the movie, kind of. It definitely was
not what I would consider a legitimately “good” movie, but it far exceeded
expectations because it had a somewhat creative approach.
The biggest problem with this film was marketing.
There was no promotion or discussion about it, not even a Wikipedia page, so that terrible trailer was all
we had to go on. The trailer sold the movie like a low-budget, wannabe thriller.
The film was, in fact, a low-budget, wannabe thriller, but operated as a
thriller more in essence than in style. So, as a standard thriller, the film
was very ineffective. As an artistic endeavor, the movie was able to convey the
appropriate dose of emotional “thrill” using a unique set of circumstances.
Here’s what I mean. A standard thriller will have lots of fast shots, moving
around from location to location, progressing a plot forward. This film is the
opposite. The shots are incredibly long, and almost the entire film takes place
in the cockpit of a plane. Almost every shot, therefore, is either a
medium-shot of Daniel Radcliffe’s face from the front, or from one of the
sides. Nothing else. They are the same two or three shots over and over again,
for 80 minutes of the film. The production lasted only around two weeks. Daniel
Radcliffe said in an interview that they often shot 25 pages of the script at a
time (for those who are unfamiliar with film scripts, 1 page is about 1 minute
of screen time, so he’d stay in character for 25 minutes straight, move the
camera, and start again). The film also operates in real time, for the most
part. Daniel Radcliffe said this was the closest experience he had to acting in
a play that he had ever experienced on a film. For that, the entire film
operates as an acting exercise. As an exercise, it’s hit or miss. Daniel
Radcliffe has some incredible acting moments, and some unnaturally awkward
ones. Grace Gummer was, as expected, fantastic, but her burden was much less as
she played a much smaller role. In this way, again, the film feels more like a
creative endeavor than a conventional film, something that should have been
made clearer to movie-goers who were expecting a run-of-the-mill thriller and
ended up getting something far more experimental.
Something I find fascinating about plays is how much
they have to move the story forward in one location. There is an added level of
restriction. This film has even more restrictions than a play does, in some
sense. Not only does the film take place in one setting, but our main character
can’t even move around that setting. He remains seated, in his cockpit, with
little leg movement. In addition, he’s alone. The only character interactions
he can have are over the phone, and much of the dialogue is him muttering to himself.
The trailer was therefore a complete misstep. Almost
all of the shots were taken from the few flashbacks that are scattered
throughout the film, as if he’s actually moving around. This is not a film you
could easily gif. It would be the same gifs over and over again. The editors
should have embraced that and incorporated it into the marketing somehow,
instead of trying to trick the wrong viewers into watching. That’s part of why
the reviews are so horrendous.
Now, I liked the approach. I thought it was unique.
But let’s talk about the story. Meh. The ending gets criticized the most. I
didn’t hate it, but I agree it was a little unrealistic. Did he get to keep the
money? How did they escape? Where did the medicine come from? Like… huh?? For a
movie that was almost entirely in real time, an ending with a time jump years
into the future made little sense. The other main issue I had with the story is
that I felt like it did not have much meaning to extrapolate. Other low-budget
Daniel Radcliffe films, like Jungle or Imperium, may have actually been far
less structured and narratively organized than this film. However, I still like
them better in the long run because they had something to take away from it.
There are parts of this film that can be considered political. Sean is only in
this position because healthcare is way too ridiculously expensive, and it
obviously raises questions about border security. However, Daniel Radcliffe
himself admitted he was not thinking of extrapolating anything from this story
other than “it’s a premise where a man gets lots of stuff thrown at him and has
to deal with it.” Especially with the sudden ending, there’s no message to take
away about the drug cartel system, the relationship between Mexico and the
U.S., or how Sean, as a white man, may have received federal protection much
easier.
If there is little for the story to offer, what about the character? This is something where lack of promotion comes into play… I usually have such
an appreciation for Daniel Radcliffe’s characters not just because of his
acting, but how much insight he has into why he approached it the way he did.
Daniel Radcliffe typically gives incredibly thorough explanations of his
character, but not for Sean (not because he didn’t have insight into this
character, but because there was no time/money to promote the film and discuss
characterization). I read some small magazine articles he did where he talks
about Sean as a serial failure with an addicts’ mentality, making the same
mistakes over and over and expecting the results to be different. As a result,
he puts everyone in danger, and continues to make things worse. At this same
time, he’s an incredible capable and competent pilot, so there’s a dialectic
there of when should he give up? This was really good background information to
know, because from the film alone, there’s not much we can infer about the character.
He just seems like your typical American white guy who ends up in a really bad
situation because of the bad people he knew in the Air Force, and his wife’s
illness. I got the sense of an “everyman,” but didn’t think much about Sean
himself. This made the emotional impact of the film much lesser than I would have preferred. (52/100)
EDIT: I think I rated this so high because my expectations were so low. It's more like a 44/100
EDIT: I think I rated this so high because my expectations were so low. It's more like a 44/100
What to watch for –
I think the only reason I appreciated this film was because I am a Daniel
Radcliffe fan. The whole film, you’re just watching him stretch his acting
capabilities. I just like watching his face and watching him operate. The
scenes inside the plane were quite successful. The few scenes he did outside of
the plane? Not so much. Probably much less rehearsed and settled into. After so
many scenes where he couldn’t use body language inside the plane, his body
language was far too overacted in certain scenes outside of it. Very unnatural.
But, still, I watched this film mostly just to watch his face and hear him
talk.
If you liked this movie, I'd recommend Imperium!
If you liked this movie, I'd recommend Imperium!
Director: Jesper Ganslandt
Studio: Momentum Pictures
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