有一段时间，在大流行的高度，当似乎是电影的未来将是“意外收获”的电影，只有一部分演员在一个位置拍摄，以便更容易形成一个安全的豆荚。良好的电影可以以这种方式制作-例如，“The Outfit,”which also opens Friday, March 18 — but doing so requires a really tight script. “Windfall” doesn’t have one.
Yet there’s one thing to take from the experience, and that’s the performance ofJesse Plemonsas a tech billionaire. Plemons plays this fellow as someone in a constant state of narcissistic pleasure at his own importance, so that when he walks across the room, you know he’s thinking, “I have billions of dollars, and I’m walking across the room.” And when he’s talking to someone, you know that he’s thinking, “I have billions of dollars. I’m talking to you, and you will remember this for the rest of your life.”
Such an inner monologue could render a performance absurd. But Plemons lays it on lightly, so that we can see just a hint of self-display in his most common gestures or actions, like when he walks into a house or opens a window. He is an interesting actor with a distinct look, and a seemingly inexhaustible range.
In the early moments, the billionaire and his wife (Lily Collins）微风进入他们的夏季住所，窃贼处于房屋。我们已经遇到了窃贼，因为他被播放了Jason Segel,who almost only plays nice guys, we are more worried about him than the couple. He tries to escape unseen, but when he is discovered, he decides to hold the two rich people hostage while he figures out how to avoid getting caught.
Two problems, straight off: From the beginning, “Windfall” seems to be heading in a direction in which the billionaire may turn out to be even less sympathetic than the burglar. But if that’s the case, it was a mistake to telegraph it by having Segel play the burglar. Better to reverse the casting and leave us with the possibility of surprise. Have Segel be a scruffy genius who just happened to hit the Silicon Valley lottery, and have Plemons play a slightly unknowable burglar.
That leads us to the second thing wrong with “Windfall”: If we’re not worried about what the burglar might do — and we don’t care about the people he might harm, even if he did — there can be no thrills in this thriller.
A third problem, just for fun: Director Charlie McDowell and his screenwriters underestimate the difficulty of making the guy with the gun sympathetic. We might dislike tech billionaires as much as everybody else who’s not a tech billionaire does. But the burglar is holding them captive, and more to the point, he’s holdinguscaptive. We’re stuck there with him, watching the minutes and hours crawl by.
In the end, about the only thing that could have saved “Windfall” was a really good ending. But what we get is something gimmicky that makes no psychological sense and that the actors cannot make work. Just for fun, if you want to see something bad, just cut to the last five minutes and watch the whole movie fall in on itself.
K“Windfall”:Starring Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons. Directed by Charlie McDowell. (R. 92 minutes.) Available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, March 18.