SELF RELIANCE - Mark Reviews Movies

Self Reliance, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 11, 2024

The premise of Self Reliance might make for a decent thriller, but this is the feature directorial debut of Jake Johnson, a sturdy comedic actor who infuses the material with plenty of humor—thereby ruining the clever gimmick for any filmmakers who might try to play the setup straight in the future. This is pretty funny stuff when it's played as a down-to-earth take on (and pseudo-takedown of) such thrillers. Yes, it would be terrifying to have complete strangers hunting you for the entertainment of the twisted audience of a competitive reality show on the dark web, but if you played the game correctly, wouldn't it also become a completely boring affair?

Beyond the jokey tone, that's the twist of Johnson's screenplay, which sees the filmmaker/star's Tommy recruited for such a game. It's pretty straightforward: If Tommy can survive the hunt for 30 days, he will win $1,000,000. Since his life's a shambles, Tommy doesn't mind too much if he's in potentially fatal peril, but he has a family.

It wouldn't be fair to bring danger to them, but that's not an issue. There's a rule—a loophole, as Tommy sees it—that no hunter can make an attempt on a contestant's life if said competitor is within striking distance of another person. Basically, Tommy can't be hurt as long as he's not alone, and how hard can not being alone be?

If that question sounds a little philosophical, that's another, less convincing angle to Johnson's movie. It should be expected, considering the fact that the filmmaker took his title from a famous Ralph Waldo Emerson essay and opens the movie with a quote from that philosopher. The whole thing isn't simply a thriller or more subversively a satire of the genre. It's also a parable or an allegory for what it means to live a life that's wholly dependent on other people, as well as the toll such inherent dependency can take on who one is as an individual.

Johnson might have bitten off a bit too much here with his debut (Most first-time filmmakers do, so it's nothing new, surprising, or wrong). It's simply trying to do too much, and as the sad state of Tommy's life and his attempt to find some footing take over the narrative and the thematic core of this story, the material loses its strengths by focusing on a character who's established as a cliché and remains one for the duration of the movie.

Once one knows the premise and Tommy's decision to take part in this most dangerous game, the basics of the character should be pretty easy to determine. Here they are anyway. Tommy is single, after being dumped a couple years back by a long-time girlfriend, who has since moved on with her life. He works a dead-end job, sitting in front of a computer at an office where nobody seems to notice him. Tommy also lives with his mother (played by Nancy Lenehan), whom he refers to as his "roommate," and his sisters (played by Mary Holland and Emily Hampshire) are convinced he's self-deluded about the kind of life he has and person he is.

Before we learn most of that, though, there's the setup of the game, which has actor Andy Samberg (playing himself) approaching Tommy in a limo, making him the offer on behalf of the show's operators, and ending up stunned in disbelief and despair when the guy agrees to it with almost no hesitation. The rest of the rules, including that loophole, come shortly thereafter, and now, it's just a matter of Tommy trying to go through his routine in the constant presence of someone else (When his family doesn't believe the story, he hires a homeless man, played by Biff Wiff, to shadow him everywhere) and with the specter of death hovering over him.

What's funny here is that nothing much happens in relation to the game (He's stalked and occasionally attacked but not often). Even so, Tommy's life more or less falls apart because of the precautions he takes, and isn't that latter result a potentially good thing, given the life that has been established? The movie keeps coming back to those bigger questions, although Johnson hasn't given himself much room to explore them with the limited characterization and plot mechanics on hand.

One of the significant questions here is whether the game is real or merely an elaborate creation of Tommy's imagination, and that unfortunately undermines the material too much. Another is the role of Maddy (Anna Kendrick), a woman who responds to Tommy's online post about his participation in the game, because she's playing it, too. He suggests they team up to keep each other safe, and the relationship becomes a whirlwind friendship/potential romance that's too shallow—despite Kendrick's charm and the sweet chemistry between the actors—to see it as anything other than a metaphor for the idea of such a bond.

The whole thing becomes messy, in other words, because Johnson is trying to tackle so much with so little backing up the attempt. Self Reliance remains amusing as a satirical thriller, but its higher ambitions get in the way without much insight or payoff.

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