Misconduct is the most disappointing type of drama/thriller, the one which seems kind of watchable for thirty minutes or so and then, twist after twist, turns into a moronic potboiler.
Lawyer Ben (Josh Duhamel), whose marriage with Charlotte (Alice Eve) has seen better days, meets old flame Emily (Malin Akerman), who teases him into rekindling a relationship and at the same time turns out to be the current girlfriend of rich executive Denning (Anthony Hopkins), against whom Ben's firm, led by Abrams (Al Pacino), has clashed before. Emily shows Ben incriminating data from Denning's personal files, but is then abducted... or is she? And that's just the beginning of a series of labyrinthine, increasingly silly events.
The movie is a ball of noir tropes crumpled together, like a dead-serious version of The Big Lebowski, with femme fatales, trophy partners of smug millionaires, fake kidnappings, mysterious henchmen and a befuddled protagonist stumbling into a string of red herrings and non-sequiturs. Unlike the Coens' sharp, hilarious classic, Misconduct oozes stupidity from every frame.
Duhamel portrays his amoral lawyer doing an effective "Timothy Olyphant passing a kidney stone" impression - at least I suppose that was the intended goal. Byung-hun Lee plays the world's least proficient hit-man, one who attacks his victims by punching them while riding a motorcycle and yet fails to kill someone tied to a chair.
Former titans Hopkins and Pacino probably high-fived between takes at the thought of the umpteenth easy paycheck. Although Pacino does get to utter the line I put in the review title, which serves as a nice meta commentary on the last part of his career.
Poor Alice Eve is uncannily stiff and dead-eyed - not the world's greatest actress to begin with, she gets saddled with an absurd character. Also, casting lookalikes Eve and Akerman (both statuesque, clear-eyed, round-faced, long-haired blondes in their mid-thirties) as, respectively, the protagonist's spouse and potential lover, was an idiotic choice. You want COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPES for the contrasting roles of the Wife and the Temptress (think Emily Mortimer/Scarlett Johansson in Match Point), not clones.
Add Julia Stiles (in a minor part as a detective) as another long-haired blonde of similar age and facial structure, and this is starting to look like The Stepford Wives.
5/10
Lawyer Ben (Josh Duhamel), whose marriage with Charlotte (Alice Eve) has seen better days, meets old flame Emily (Malin Akerman), who teases him into rekindling a relationship and at the same time turns out to be the current girlfriend of rich executive Denning (Anthony Hopkins), against whom Ben's firm, led by Abrams (Al Pacino), has clashed before. Emily shows Ben incriminating data from Denning's personal files, but is then abducted... or is she? And that's just the beginning of a series of labyrinthine, increasingly silly events.
The movie is a ball of noir tropes crumpled together, like a dead-serious version of The Big Lebowski, with femme fatales, trophy partners of smug millionaires, fake kidnappings, mysterious henchmen and a befuddled protagonist stumbling into a string of red herrings and non-sequiturs. Unlike the Coens' sharp, hilarious classic, Misconduct oozes stupidity from every frame.
Duhamel portrays his amoral lawyer doing an effective "Timothy Olyphant passing a kidney stone" impression - at least I suppose that was the intended goal. Byung-hun Lee plays the world's least proficient hit-man, one who attacks his victims by punching them while riding a motorcycle and yet fails to kill someone tied to a chair.
Former titans Hopkins and Pacino probably high-fived between takes at the thought of the umpteenth easy paycheck. Although Pacino does get to utter the line I put in the review title, which serves as a nice meta commentary on the last part of his career.
Poor Alice Eve is uncannily stiff and dead-eyed - not the world's greatest actress to begin with, she gets saddled with an absurd character. Also, casting lookalikes Eve and Akerman (both statuesque, clear-eyed, round-faced, long-haired blondes in their mid-thirties) as, respectively, the protagonist's spouse and potential lover, was an idiotic choice. You want COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TYPES for the contrasting roles of the Wife and the Temptress (think Emily Mortimer/Scarlett Johansson in Match Point), not clones.
Add Julia Stiles (in a minor part as a detective) as another long-haired blonde of similar age and facial structure, and this is starting to look like The Stepford Wives.
5/10