All Good Things
- Title: All Good Things
- IMDB: link
Although the film is based on the real events surrounding the life of Robert Durst, the main problem with the screenplay by Marcus Hinchey and Marc Smerling is how ridiculous the events appear when recreated on film.
What starts as a love story and tense drama about a troubled son of a real estate broker devolves into a thriller. Then the thriller turns into the kind of cinematic disaster nobody wants on their resume. All Good Things may be based on a real story but it plays like bad fiction.
There’s something off about David Marks (Ryan Gosling) the first time we meet him, but that’s not enough to stop the charming Katie (Kirsten Dunst) from falling for him. Needled by his father’s (Frank Langella) disapproval David and Katie leave the tranquil health food store in Vermont so David can act as the bagman for the family business collecting cash from various seedy Times Square enterprises which the Marks famly owns.
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Originally intended as a vehicle for Tom Cruise Salt was shelved and then given an impromptu sex change operation to ready the way for Angelina Jolie to headline the shoot ’em up. When your leading man becomes a leading lady the original script by Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet , Street Kings) had to be rewritten by Brian Helgeland (Conspiracy Theory, Assassins, Man on Fire), and director Philip Noyce (The Bone Collector, Clear and Present Danger) was tasked to make it all work. That’s an awful lot of time and effort to put into a project well before shooting was scheduled to begin. Too bad it wasn’t worth it.
At a time when Hollywood seems dead set on giving movies bloodless one and two-word titles that don’t give you a clue as to what the movie is about comes a film called Ninja Assassin. It’s about ninjas who kill people. Finally, a little truth in advertising.
Although Whiteout was slightly better than I expected, the film is nothing more than your basic thriller complete with a masked killer, a plucky detective with hidden scars, dangerous situations (most of which could be avoided the slightest hint of common sense), and a late plot twist which is far less surprising than it’s expected to be.