Future World |
USA • 2018 • 90m •
   • Directed by: James Franco, Bruce Thierry Cheung. • Starring: James Franco, Milla Jovovich, Lucy Liu, Suki Waterhouse, Margarita Levieva, Method Man, Elisha Henig, Snoop Dogg, Scott Haze, Carmen Argenziano, Destiny Austin, Wilmer Calderon, Tamzin Brown. • Music by: Toydrum.      A young boy searches a future world wasteland for a rumored cure for his dying mother.
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Review:
To say this film is bad is an understatement. How it even got made, let alone attracted such stars to its roster, is mind-boggling. A little research reveals it to be some sort of passion project for Franco (whom I've always considered hugely overrated), made almost on a whim. Well, if this is an example of Franco when he's fired up enough to make a movie, I'd hate to see what he'd come up with in the throes of depression.
As for those stars... don't expect to see that much of them. Lucy Liu spends the first and last few minutes of the film in a bed, sickly, and is never seen in between. Jovovich gets more time towards the end and Franco rears his overacting head from time to time as "Generic Bad Guy Leader #672". Snoop Dogg has a middle slot in the film, for all of five minutes.
Other than that, the entire movie is hung on the shoulders of two young (and at times awfully bad) actors who go about their roles with all the enthusiasm of people who've just been informed they have a terminal illness. They are just woefully unable to carry the movie at all and the result is a dull, tedious slog that has you twitching towards the fast forward controls every other minute.
Their attempts aren't helped by the woefully inept story, irritating pseudo-techno music and awful dialogue. Characters have names like War Lord, Drug Lord and Love (can you guess?) Lord. The whole thing is just a mess from start to finish.
To make matters worse, as always when you have actors of varying capabilities in the same film, the good actors make the poor ones look worse by comparison. Lucy Liu effortlessly gives us a "sick mother" performance whilst her son (Wahlberg) doesn't even convince us he's awake, let alone concerned for her health.
Sets appear to be any old ruined building they could find, or some old junk thrown together to pretend to be a camp. None of it convinces at all and just looks like the cheap solution that it is.
If this was an attempt to mimic similar movies from the 80's then it failed dismally. You can't just throw any old crap into a desert setting, have people ride motorbikes around and call it an homage to Mad Max. There is nothing new in this film that you won't have seen done better in any film from that period (and trust me, there were some real stinkers back then, too!) All you will get is the feeling that everyone involved in this production were just going through the motions. No ingenuity. No creativity. Just a whole lot of "Are we done yet? Where's my paycheck?"
SUMMARY: Stillborn love child of Mad Max and Cherry 2000 that was buried, then exhumed thirty years later and connected to a car battery to make it twitch spasmodically as if it was alive.
Review by Rob_Taylor from the Internet Movie Database.
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