A Colossal Disappointment

Okay, Colossal starring Anne Hathaway isn’t all that bad, but besides making a good movie review title, it was also certainly underwhelming. Written and directed by some guy named Nacho, this indie flick knows it’s a weird one. But that’s not the issue.

            Starring Anne Hathaway as the lazy, drunk Gloria, she quickly gets kicked out by her boyfriend in order to change her lifestyle around. So, she returns to her small hometown that she left all those years ago. Needing any kind of job, she ends up going to work for her old childhood friend Jason Sudeikis at his bar. The movie starts embracing its weirdness once Gloria figures out that at a certain time at a certain place at a park, she controls the movements of a giant monster thing that suddenly appears in Seoul, South Korea. As a quick side note, the homage to Godzilla of shots of little Asian kids screaming at the monster is probably my favorite thing about the movie.

            Again, when the film is full out strange with Gloria and the monster simultaneously dancing, everybody’s having a grand ol’ time. But the downfall comes with Nacho. The dialogue is nothing to write home to your sweetheart about, and the directing hinders the actors’ abilities instead of letting them go to work. But Mr. Nacho’s worst crime is the story itself. Strange, promising premise, sure, but once you realize that’s all it is, it starts to unravel.

            Gloria is a flawed character to start out with, but she basically redeems herself within the first 30 minutes. So at this point it’s like well shoot, we need some kind of conflict! And lo and behold a manufactured conflict is created. It’s not even worthy of being called a plot twist. The conflict is so forced and deprived of any motivation or intensity that you wish it went back to Gloria and the monster doing their stuff. Alas, the audience has to sit through an hour of the conflict just to wait to see how it’s resolved.

            Quite honestly, this film could have been a made as a long short film and been much better. Nacho came up with an interesting idea, but he didn’t know what to do with it. The actors are enjoyable, but even they feel lazy when they have Nacho directing them. Seeing Colossal wouldn’t be any huge mistake or anything, but just don’t expect it to have all the charms and quirks that one would to get out of an indie flick like this. All in all, this film is more like a colossal meh.