Future World (2018)
A young boy searches a future world wasteland for a rumored cure for his dying mother.
Stars:
To say that “Future World” borrows liberally from George Miller’s
milieu would be an understatement. He may want to look into royalty
checks (although that implies this will make money, which seems
unlikely). This ticks SO many of the “Fury Road” boxes, from extended
sequences of masked men on motor bikes to the story of a kept woman who
becomes empowered to a mythical place in this barren landscape that
promises a better future called Paradise Beach. That’s where our hero
Prince (Jeffrey Wahlberg) wants to get, believing that he will find there the medicine to save to his dying mother (Lucy Liu).
Prince’s journey takes him to a place called Love Town, run by futuristic pimp Love Lord, played by, of course, Snoop Dogg
(casting is the most creative thing about “Future World”). In one of
the film’s very few brief glimpses of creativity, the dancers and
prostitutes of Love Town are literally controlled by clients and the
Love Lord through the use of what looks like shock collars around their
necks. And yet Franco and co-director Bruce Thierry Cheung
don’t have much to say about controlling women in this future vision.
It’s just an interesting concept/visual for them, and then they move on.
Everything in “Future World” is skin-deep, shallow versions of deeper
material from other films.
This is certainly the case with Ash (Suki Waterhouse),
an android first awoken by the evil Warlord (James Franco) but who
eventually escapes with Prince. Why? Because the movie says so. She has
an awakening and revolts against her captor and those who would use her
for sex or violence and she takes off with Prince to the find the
medicine. Along the way, they run into mostly bad guys, including a
scene-stealing turn from Milla Jovovich, who looks like she came from a more interesting movie but shows up way too late into this one to save it.
Most of “Future World” is incoherent and boring. A typical “action
sequence” consists of men riding motor bikes over hills or a
poorly-choreographed fight. There’s a non-stop obtrusive, “futuristic”
score to try and keep you awake but even that starts to become numbing.
Among many problems, perhaps the biggest is that Ash and Prince are
deadly dull as leading characters. There’s a scene after they take off
together in which they talk about whether or not she has a soul during
which I swear I felt mine leaving my body.
Despite the number of times I’ve been burned by James Franco’s directorial efforts (check out my review of “The Institute,”
a movie stolen by Franco’s mustache, for another example), I’m still
eager to see what he does next. He often takes risks that other
directors wouldn’t and I’m always interested in filmmakers who seem to
be making what they want to make regardless of concern about the bottom
line. The problem here is that while Franco probably wanted to make his
own “Mad Max” at one point, by the time the initial buzz of the project
faded and he got to the desert, you can tell that even he just wanted to
go home.
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