Pretty much a very ordinary waste of my time and that of all others involved

Rating: 4/10 (16 December 2016)

What do you do when you want to have a hoot, to have a little downtime? Well, you and I might ring a few friends, get a few cans of lager, find a guitar and throw an impromptu party. And what to the Coen brothers do (that's Joel and Ethan to you and I) when they just want to do nothing but let their hair down? Why, they make a film, that's what. That's what being worth several million and having a Tinseltown backstory of commercial success allows you to do. And Hail Caesar is that film. Is it any good? Well, not really, no. In fact, not at all.
Granted - given that Tinseltown backstory and the investors rubbing their hands in anticipation - no expense is spared, and the Coen's latest has high production values, a full stable of stars - Clooney, Swinton, Brolin, Johansson, Fiennes and Tatum pop up (George, Tilda, Josh, Scarlett, 'Rafe and Channing to the Coens, no doubt) - one or two good lines and oodles of great camera shots, but dear hearts it is all for naught: Hail Caesar is just not very good. And it might well have been panned had any others but the saintly Coens been at the helm.
I read just the other day that Hail Caesar was made after the brothers had completed scripts for several blockbusters, you know, the kind of films deemed to be 'possible Oscar winners' - Bridge Of Spies and Unbroken were just two - and the suggestion was that they wanted just to take it a little easy for a change.
Well, Hail Caesar was the result. Bitty, potentially interesting but in practice rather dull, and - am I really going to say this? Yes, I am - pretty incoherent. The budget was an estimated $22 million and the take so far has been almost ten times that, so the backstory gets another chapter and the investors will indulge the brothers further. But for what? There's half a story, and several other quarter stories, none thought out but apparently merely sketched on the back of a Malibu restaurant menu, and then away it was. George, Tilda, Josh, Scarlett, 'Rafe and Channing, most hardly seen except for a few scenes and except for Brolin who plays what I suppose must be described as 'the central character', pretty much phone in their performances before taking off to weightier projects.
The exception, perhaps, was young Alden Ehrenreich, who was able to flesh out rather nicely a part as small as all the others, but whose name I shall keep a look out for (he's still quite young), but even his performance goes no way to redeeming what to be frank is so sketchy it couldn't even be called a vanity project.
Some themes are touched upon much as you and I - who, of course, are just ordinary schmucks - might pick consider picking up a bargain in the supermarket, then replacing it after losing interest within seconds and moving on. This takes place in the early Fifties and there's some slender sub-plot about a gang of Communist lefty writers kidnapping and holding to ransom a big star, Clooney. There's another sub-plot of a young starlet having to be married off somehow given that she will be dropping a kid in a few months, but that also remains resolutely and remorselessly undeveloped.
There's a further, quite baffling, sub-plot about Brolin's Tinseltown fixer Eddie Mannix (the real one was apparently a nasty piece of work, but that's just by the by) being wooed to jack it all in and take over leading Lockheed, the plane makers. Why we aren't told and that, too, is left so sketchy as to be pretty much irrelevant.
So there you have it: the Coens have fun and let their hair down and have a good time. Trouble is, I didn't, and you might or might not either. So if this comes your way, look around for meatier fare before settling in, or even consider taking down a good book from the shelf and do a bit of reading instead. Good in any particular way Hail Caesar really is not.