Walton Goggins

  • Three Christs (2017)

    Three Christs (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) It’s almost de rigueur to expect much from a film featuring Richard Gere, Peter Dinklage and Walton Goggins. Even the topic is intriguing, as a psychiatrist sets out to bring three mental patients in a room, each believing that they are Jesus Christ, just to see what would happen. If that’s familiar to you, it’s because Three Christs is based on a true experiment from the 1960s, and it goes for a dramatic recreation of the book later written by the psychiatrist on the topic. (A very loose adaptation, even featuring a suicide that never happened in real life.)  Alas, all of those elements don’t quite end up in an interesting package. Filled with limp scenes, familiar elements seemingly taken from better movies, a meandering narrative, obvious attempts at synthetic emotions and numerous lulls, Three Christs would be a mediocre movie with or without the wasted talents of its lead actors. By the time the film sacrifices one of its characters from a rooftop in order to make an incredibly familiar point about institutional overreach, well, it’s as if Three Christ works overtime to ensure that it’s catering to expectations, but not out of conviction. The period setting is nice but it doesn’t bring much. It’s difficult to remain interested in Three Christs the longer it goes on — and it goes on for quite a while later than it should.

  • The Hateful Eight (2015)

    The Hateful Eight (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2016) As a confirmed Quentin Tarantino fan, I was expecting The Hateful Eight with a bit of cinephile glee, curious to see what he had in mind. After all, each of his movie is usually an event, doing thing with cinema that other filmmakers usually don’t try. His newest offering makes the unusual bet to transform itself in practically a theatre piece by putting eight characters in a snowbound lodge. The suspense is notable, as most of these characters have backstories and plenty of secrets to reveal in the film’s lengthy running time. By the end, the film becomes graphically violent as tensions erupt in all-out shootouts, poisoning and hanging. The dialogues are good and the performances terrific (with particular applause for Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh), with some assured direction from Tarantino. And yet, and yet… The Hateful Eight doesn’t quite amount to something as good as it could have been. For all of the dialogue’s deliciousness, the film does feel overlong and far too busy for its own good. As the complex plotting and counterplotting accumulates, it’s easy to disengage from the experience of the film. The conclusion is also particularly grim, which doesn’t help. As a result, it feels less interesting than (say) Django Unchained and not quite as meaningful either. Still, even a lesser Tarantino film can feel far more fascinating than other films by more pedestrian authors, so let’s count our blessings that the film exists and wait for Tarantino to come up with something new.