I don’t have much to say about this movie, but I did see it tonight, and I do have a few words. I do not guarantee these words will mean anything to you.
I had read that CA:FT was not so much a movie as a series of visually interesting sequences strung together by the bare skeleton of a story. And as I watched it unfold before my eyes, I realised that the people saying this were right. The movie jumped from one unbelievable thing to the next with little rhyme, reason, or explanation. It became apparent I was watching a farce of some sort, but as some things I’ve seen in movie theatres have proven to be in the past, it was not shaping up to be a movie. Entertaining, maybe. Funny, sometimes. Visually stunning, definitely. Those ladies clearly have some of the same reality-altering abilities as The One does in The Matrix; they simply do not follow physical laws. Which is good, because often their enemies don’t bother to, either.
Anyway, so I was settling in to enjoy these oddly-patched-together bits that couldn’t possibly add up to a movie, when finally Demi Moore’s character was revealed as evil. Look, I’m not giving anything away here, from what I understand (remember, I live 100 miles from civilization & have no TV, and thus no commercials) the entire movie ahs been far, far overplayed and overhyped and you probably know more than I do about it without even watching it. So Demi Moore appears on-screen and suddenly it’s as though I’m watching a movie. I don’t know how long she lasted, maybe twenty minutes, but for almost the entirety of the time she was an active character, it actually felt like I was watching a good movie. Which is saying a lot, considering the last paragraph I wrote, where I said it wasn’t even a movie. The characters made sense and had depth and the series of actions were tied together in a reasonably believable way, and there was even a reversal-of-fortune that was an excellent (though easy to discover before the character it is played on does) little twist. I was really beginning to believe they’d get away with satisfied audiences; most audiences will forgive two hours of mistakes if the ending is satisfying.
But then, at the last minute (okay, the last five minutes), Demi was no longer at threat and … the movie fell apart. It was no longer a movie. It was jibber-jabber and wackiness and stupid over-the-top girly-girlness and some too-too-edited-down running joke about ‘Bosley’ that wasn’t even close to funny, and THEN it was over. And I left dissatisfied because it had had potential and it threw it away. If it had ended well, or if it had never given me a glimpse of the movie it could have been, I would have been satisfied, but it set me up and dropped me down again. No wonder people aren’t watching it. No wonder word-of-mouth is so bad. It’s inconsistent and disappoints by almost being good.
Oh well.
