AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! (A review of 'At Midnight')
Paramount
Actually, “At Midnight” doesn’t deserve a review. It demands a live-tweet into a megaphone, held to the flaming mouth of a dragon. That doesn’t really make sense. But neither does the existence of this capital-A Atrocity, which spits in the face of the romantic comedy genre while presenting every cliché as a discovery.
Even more directly ripping off “Notting Hill” than “The Valet,” “At Midnight” forces together Sophie (Monica Barbaro of “Top Gun: Maverick), an actress recently cheated on by her doofus boyfriend/co-star (Anders Holm), and Alejandro (Diego Boneta), a hotel employee in Mexico who only believes in short flings with tourists. It’s not just that director/co-writer Jonah Feingold indulges every feeble, obvious opportunity for comedy (He accidentally delivers towels just as she’s getting out of the shower! An agent, played by Whitney Cummings to really prove that fury is the desired reaction here, turns the term “short stick” into a dick joke! The two gay characters flirt about “cock … tails”!) but that, quite simply, these are horrible, stereotypical characters in stupid situations without a single legitimate reason to be together.
At various points, Alejandro is proven to be an unsupportive liar who doesn’t take accountability. Sophie is simultaneously hurting and on the rebound and yet also of totally sound mind, even though she has no actual goals (beyond landing a role in the absurdly fake-sounding “New York or Nowhere,” which Google tells me is an existing lifestyle brand?) or a believable reaction to anything that happens to her. Barbaro was good in “Top Gun: Maverick." Here she frequently seems embarrassed about so many things, including the film’s inability to decide if Sophie starring in the “Super Society” franchise (she's at the hotel while filming but is also almost always on break) is supposed to be a joke or not. Boneta, so terrible in the equally unwatchable “Rock of Ages,” gives Alejandro not an ounce of charm or character. He’s a gossiping coward (in place of Hugh Grant’s affable catch), and it would be hard to root for an onscreen couple less. The film's contemporary insight about Hollywood and fandom ranks just below the worst episode of “Entourage” and just above someone with a lower-back tattoo of Harry Knowles.
Throughout the shockingly amateur “At Midnight” you will decide that a movie doesn’t have to be disgusting to make you nauseous and really has to know nothing about love or people to be so careless with its presentation of both. The thing deserves to be arrested for fraud and shot into space and taught in film classes anytime someone asks, “What’s the opposite of a classic?”
Wait, I get it now: Paramount is releasing “At Midnight” in response to everyone who foolishly bashed the studio’s fantastic “Babylon” — a much different exploration of affection between a white, female movie star and a Mexican man trying to climb his way up — as a way of saying, “Oh, you don’t want a stunning and complex epic that blends entertainment and curiosity, high art and lowbrow humor in a way of asking what people want and can even get from movies now? If you don’t want the elephant, I guess you prefer to sit beneath him.”
The reaction to “Babylon” is why we can’t have nice things, and “At Midnight” is what the universe spawns in its place.
F
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