"Come with me / And you'll be / In a world of pure imagination". So goes Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory's "Pure Imagination", a version of which scored the first trailers for Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One and promised an imagination fuelled adventure in the process - a promise only reinforced by main character Wade Watts' description of The Oasis (a virtual reality that most of the population of Earth spend the bulk of their time in 2045) as a world where "the limits of reality are your own imagination". So with that in mind, how is it that Ready Player One has ended up being one of the most deeply unimaginative and creatively bankrupt films I've even seen?
The answer is simple but depressing: it's a film that seems to be operating under the wild misconception that grouping a lot of recognisable things created by other people's imagination under one roof counts as using your own. It doesn't, obviously, and yet it's so busy doing this throughout that it forgets to do much of anything else, meaning that while those looking for a seemingly never ending parade of pop culture references presented to the audience with all the intelligence, elegance and wit as an episode of The Big Bang Theory are in luck, those looking for an engaging story or interesting characters or... well, a real movie, are going to end up feeling more than just a little bored and frustrated with a film that simply doesn't even seem to be trying.
"Brilliant!" I hear you say through the microphone(s) I've hidden on your person, "a film where parents are driven to kill their children by a mysterious radio transmission? Starring Nicholas Cage, written and directed by the guy behind the Crank films? This is going to be a blast!"
Well not so fast, my clueless friend. Your line of reasoning makes sense - it's always fun when Nicholas Cage goes full Nicholas Cage, and the idea of seeing that happen in a film about child murder that's written and directed by Brian Taylor is an exciting one - but there are two pretty fundamental problems at the heart of Mom and Dad that stop it from ever being the film you think it might be. The first is simple: Nicholas Cage is the main reason that most people will want to see Mom and Dad, but there are large stretches of it that he's entirely absent from, presumably because the film doesn't have a high enough budget to pay Cage's fee throughout. The second is... a little more complicated.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal". It's a fairly well-known saying that speaks to the way art evolves over time as the innovations of influential artists seep into the work of those who come along later, but it's worth breaking down what exactly the phrase means by "steal". Mimicry or simple replication isn't enough; you have to make something your own in order to steal it, add your own unique spin or use it in a particular way that stamps your name on it, and that means that I, Tonya - a biopic whose style was quite clearly heavily influenced by the work of Martin Scorsese - doesn't qualify as an act of theft. Appropriately then, it also doesn't qualify as great art - merely quite good.
At the very least it's a vast improvement over the pale Scorsese imitation that David O. Russell has been doing for the last few years, thanks in large part to director Craig Gillespie's much firmer grasp of how to make the particulars of this style - such as the fourth-wall breaking narration, or the eclectic soundtrack - work on-screen. But just as important to why I, Tonya works where films like Joy don't is the simple fact that the story of disgraced American figure skater Tonya Harding is both a) actually worth telling and b) well-suited to this style of film-making, hitting all the required funny, sad and tense beats as it focuses on a number of vibrant, almost larger-than-life characters who you actually want to learn more about and see interact with one another.
