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IN LIKE FLYNN
Director: Russell Mulcahy Cast: Thomas Cocquerel, Corey Large, Clive Standen, William Moseley, David Wenham, Dan Fogler, David Hennessey, Isabel Lucas, Callan Mulvey, Grace Huang, Nathalie Kelley MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:46 Release Date: 1/25/19 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 24, 2019 The opening credits for In Like Flynn promises "a mostly true account" of the early adventures of Errol Flynn before he became a movie star. We could attempt to hash out just how much of a modifier that pesky "mostly" actually is, but what would be the fun in that? It's better, perhaps, just to assume that Flynn, who was almost as famous for his off-set escapades as for his on-screen persona, was engaging in at least a bit of exaggeration when he wrote his 1937 autobiography Beam Ends. The book told the tale of his trek from Australia to New Guinea in search of hidden gold. The opening sequence of Russell Mulcahy's movie plays along with that notion, giving us an old-fashioned sense of thrill (with a level of blood and gore that would have made the folks in the Hays office faint). A young Errol (Thomas Cocquerel, offering the right kind of swagger) guides a team of filmmakers through the jungle, evading traps, cannibals, and crocodiles along the way. The sequence is so over-the-top—and Mulcahy's staging of it embraces that fact—that it shows a lot of promise for a biography that adheres more to the legend of its subject than the actual truth. The rest of the movie, while certainly feeling more than a bit embellished (the convenient coincidences, the last-second saves, and the complication piling up on each other), never matches that initial energy. After stealing a boat from a female pirate (played by Grace Huang), Errol takes his pals Rex (Corey Large) and Dook (William Moseley), accompanied by the boat's original owner Charlie (Clive Standen), on an adventure that includes some bareknuckle boxing, a little town full of corrupt local politics, some accidental opium smuggling, a not-so-close call with a shark, and being stranded at sea. It sounds more exciting than it actually is, though, since the screenplay (written by a quartet of writers, including one of Flynn's grandsons) starts taking its story of male bonding under pressure a bit too seriously. That might be refreshing, if the characters had any weight to them, but the human side of In Like Flynn feels less authentic than the adventures. We can accept the inauthenticity of the latter, because that's kind of the gag, but when the characters are this one-dimensional, their stories just get in the way. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
some violence, drug use and a brief sexual reference)
