Carter is a new single-take action flick from the director of The Villainess… which had a number of great single take action scenes in an otherwise muddled plot. Carter has a plot… something something North and South Korea, a rogue agent with memory loss, the CIA, two little girls to rescue (I think), and even a Chinese train… an action/spy flick that throws all the single take tricks at the wall and marvels at its own cleverness as it oozes into a puddle on the floor. Oh, and zombies.
The film is a din of chaos, a shot glass of the most caffeinated coffee mixed with ten cans of Jolt Cola and 5 Hour Energy. A dozen lines of cocaine while hopped up on Aderall. An overstimulated cat zooming in ten different directions chasing five laser pointers in the middle of the night. It’s an ambitious mess. Surely energetic, buzzy, ambitious, and nearly experimental… but hobbled by shoddy and woefully low budget CGI.
The entire film is shot to look like one continuous take… and if the camera operator, CGI guys, and the editor were better at their jobs, that might have been impressive. But even the best one-shot films like 1917 run the risk of smarty pants audience members trying to catch the hidden cuts. This movie doesn’t have that problem because its “hidden” cuts dance and strut across the stage with a great big neon sign pointing out how bad they are. Obvious, unconvincing, and often hidden behind terrible god rays, unconvincing smoke, and just random jittery camera shake.
The film has no concept of pacing, rising action, falling action, or crescendo. If everything – and I mean everything – is an exclamation point, then nothing is an exclamation point. It’s all one jittery sequence after another with a free floating camera so happy to fly above, below, and all points in between that you’d be forgiven if you got motion sick. Or a migraine. And no amount of Dramamine or Excedrin will help.
Which isn’t to say I don’t have a certain admiration for the ambition. They sure tried, putting their stunt team, bad CGI, and jaunty camera drones to work. And sometimes some of the action breaks through the noise and you can say, “yeah, that was cool.” Though, by the end of the movie, it could have been tossing in the biggest, most badass stunts in cinematic history and I wouldn’t have noticed since it was all the same mash-up of noise.
There are some moments that a pure action junkie might love in this film but I think even the most hyperkinetic wired fanboy will say this is too much. A for effort, D for delivery.
Score: 63