Hail, the Coen Brothers fail!

Rating: 4/10 (25 July 2016)

Hail, Caesar!, a so called "screw-ball" Coen Brothers comedy which doubles up as a way for the Brothers to showcase their love for all things old school Hollywood, sees the two esteemed filmmakers get lost in themselves in largely boorish fashion with a cinematic experience that easily ranks amongst their most average of films.
This average experience stems from a film that is concerned almost exclusively with a narrative that has no real drive and no real reason to make us care and while loose narratives can work and have worked for the Coen's with gems like The Big Lebowski and to a lesser extent Inside Llewyn Davis, Hail, Caesar! has neither the wit, charisma or characters to make this seem like anything more than the filmmakers excuse to do a few song and dance numbers and play dress ups with their A-list cast.
The plot, if there is actually such a thing harboured within the film, sees Josh Brolin's lifeless studio fixer Eddie Mannix stumbling around studio backlots and seedy Chinese restaurants whilst George Clooney's kidnapped actor Baird Whitlock converses with his academic captors over a few finger sandwiches. It's a plot that's not enough to hold our interest and a plot that never really allows any serious laughs in a film that should've had quite a few and while the film certainly looks lovely thanks to the to be expected great work of DOP Roger Deakin's and the newly announced young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich shows himself to be quite the find, Hail, Caesar! just never gels into a cohesive whole and feels like an experience of the Coen Brothers parodying themselves into a corner.
Hugely disappointing and entirely forgettable, Hail, Caesar! marks a low point in the Coen Brothers modern day repertoire and will surely go down as one of their greatest missed opportunities when all is considered from cast, setting right through to material that should've suited their unique sensibilities.
Saved from the doldrums thanks to some sporadic scenes of life and colour and some neat cameos from the Coen Brothers extensive list of A-list friends, Hail, Caesar! is hopefully a rare blip on the usually stellar Coen Brothers radar.
2 dangerously positioned scarf's out of 5