I spent the majority of Of Unknown Origin on the thin line dividing like and dislike. Upon the arrival of the film's end, I fell over to the dislike side.
Bart (Peter Weller) is an executive who is assigned a project by his boss that will guarantee his rise up the corporate ladder. While his wife and son go out of town, Bart stays behind to focus on his project. At random, we start to see very close up shots of a clearly over sized rodent. For some reason, a large rat that also lives in Bart's brownstone for who knows how long, suddenly decides that it will torment Bart, thus making it difficult for him to complete his assigned task. Bart also goes a bit nutty, and starts to obsess over the rat and learns as much as he can about vermin in general (at one point he views an illustration of one with the caption "of unknown origin," which explains the rather ominous and somewhat misleading title of the film). He spouts off a monologue filled with facts about rats at a business dinner making the guests quite uncomfortable. He slowly descends into "madness" which his co workers assume is simply fatigue from being overworked. Oh, how right they are. Trying to kill a rat the size of a small dog is quite arduous. Well, at least for Bart.
Aside from Weller (and the ending,which I will get to), this movie is alarmingly mediocre. Weller is really quite funny, a trait that he keeps no matter how mad he becomes. In fact, the worse he gets, the more funny he seems. There is a fair amount of seriousness to his lunacy, which is also quite effective (especially this eye roll that he does during a hallucination) and gives his performance believability. It's not a superbly written film, and no one else gives any noteworthy performances.
The runtime is quite short at 88 minutes, but it seems much longer. This is attributed to the relentless back and forth from work to home, home to work. This was fine some of the time; it was funny to see Bart have to stay up all night chasing a rat and then try to perform at work, but a lot of the time, nothing really eventful happened at either location. The film would have done well to stop switching back and forth early in the film. The part of the story involving his job doesn't get resolved, so there would be no loss of story by doing it this way. Perhaps even there could have been a large chunk of film where the rat issue resolves and then we go back to the office one last time.
Which brings me to the end of the film. While the film was not great shakes, I was interested enough to watch until the end. Naturally, I am waiting for an excellent ending to validate this journey. FAIL. If the film was really good up to that point, I could just call it a bad ending, but this just made me hate the whole film and made me think I wasted my time. Essentially what happens is, he kills it, and destroys his house in the process. Then as his wife walks in and sees the house destroyed, he dismisses it with "I had a party," hinting that he has returned to his former self, as if never having gone through making a 'medieval' weapon out of a bat, nails and other sharp objects. True, one can "obsess" over something and it seem like it was consuming (Angry Birds, for example), and then return to a normal day, but the two are hardly the same. Bart clearly crosses a line, hallucinating multiple times. It would have made much more sense and a better ending, if Bart's wife and son came home to find a broken, permanently damaged man, who may have killed his adversary, but lost his sanity in doing so. But, no, the movie just ends after this line, as if to say, "Who cares about anything else? The rat is dead."
I will also say that the scenes with the rat were good. Quite a bit of tension and at least one good jump. However, this is yet another thing ruined by a piss poor ending.
This is a film that I really wish I liked. Peter Weller is awesome in this, and I feel like the poor quality of the film overall will not drive very many to witness his performance.
Comments
Post a Comment