Film review: TERMINAL (Vaughn Stein, 2018)

A waitress talks to a dying man. Two bickering assassins await orders on their next hit. And a quirky janitor lurks around a dilapidated train station. These seemingly disparate goings on in an anonymous neon-lit British town are all somehow linked, and slowly the plot pieces together in Vaughn Stein’s crime caper that plays out as a terrible Quentin Tarantino rip-off.

Margot Robbie stars as Annie, the aforementioned waitress, although she takes on a range of disguises throughout the film – as a raven-haired femme fatale, a sultry pole dancer, the villainous Nurse Ratched type who wants to first, do some harm – none of them with any conviction. In Terminal, she gives a phoned in, even more over-baked version of her Suicide Squad performance. And, whilst the acting is inadequate, her attempt at a Cockney accent is downright laughable.

Robbie had said that she was inspired by her pal Rita Ora for her accent, which tells you all you need to know about the level of commitment and research she put into her role in Terminal.

Ever since Margot Robbie started hanging out with Cara Delevingne, I've noticed the quality of her acting performances has declined significantly. In Goodbye Christopher Robin, she tried to hard to do a posh British accent in an overall stilted performance. She flattered to deceive in I, Tonya; whenever a beautiful woman de-glams, the predominantly straight white male population of the Oscar voters tend to mistake that for acting chops.

Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), Florence Pugh (Lady Macbeth), and, dare I say it, Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes) would have been far more worthy recipients of the Best Actress Oscar nomination ahead of her although Bugeyes was absolutely insufferable when she presented Best Director this year, so allow her.

And in Terminal, she completes the hat-trick of under-whelming performances as her attempts to convey Annie's derangement come off as extremely panto. I suspect Robbie chose this film because in adopting Annie's various personas, she would get to exhibit her versatility. But the truth is, she can't even get the spine of the role - the garrulous, pert, waitress, right, let alone any of the contrived additions.

The rest of the cast aren’t as jarring to watch as Robbie, but it was still a chore to sit through their performances. Dexter Fletcher, whom I’ve never noticed in anything else before (but Wikipedia tells me he directed Eddie the Eagle and took over from Bryan Singer in directing the upcoming Queen biopic), plays it very one-note, shouty and agitated. His crime partner, Alf, played by Max Irons, looks gormless throughout (Max's father, Jeremy Irons, was in another 2018 film of comparable excretable quality, Red Sparrow, so perhaps poor film choices of late is a family trait?). Mike Myers is pure caricature as the janitor with a limp who keeps popping up at inopportune moments.

Only Simon Pegg (currently on cinema screens in Mission Impossible – Fallout as Tom Cruise’s sidekick Benji) escapes the film with any credibility, playing it straight as a grouchy English teacher dying of an undiagnosed, painful disease, but reluctant to commit suicide because he fears for his immortal soul.

These individuals’ roles in the bigger picture is revealed in the third act, when the way the characters patchwork together into an overly-elaborate revenge scheme is revealed. But the twists are nonsensical, arbitrary, and just smack of the writers trying to hard to have their ‘gotcha!’ moment.

One has the feeling the writer-director Vaughn Stein came up with the twists first, and sculpted the rest of the film around it, without putting much thought into the plot other than the fact that he wanted the film to have the aesthetics of a gaudy Blade Runner homage. The man does not an original bone in his body, and all the thriller tropes that occur in Terminal, from the criminal puppet master who uses a voice changer, to a pair of crooks who banter back and forth, have been seen in other films (Saw and Pulp Fiction, respectively), and with considerably more panache.

The dialogue in Terminal has characters quoting Alice in Wonderland as if it’s Socrates and speaking in clunky, senseless platitudes like 'you've tumbled down the rabbit hole, far beyond hope or rhyme or reason' in some of the worst writing I’ve encounter in a film.

Alarm bells ran, at the film’s fluorescent opening credits, when about 20 executive producers were listed. If a film had a strong script, it would not need that many sources of funding. Margot Robbie herself is named as one of the film’s producers, which lends credence to something my personal Messiah, Mark Kermode said – ‘actors should act. Actors should not produce. Because when they do, the output is usually rubbish’.

Going by the quality of this film, Margot Robbie is as shrewd at choosing projects as she is at choosing friends.

Mike Myers came out of a 7-year hiatus to make this film. Given that it’s one of the biggest sins committed to celluloid, he should probably have prolonged that holiday a bit.

1/10

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Not everything I watch is garbage! For reviews of some films I enjoyed, click here.

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