MovieChat Forums > Monsieur Spade (2024) Discussion > I tried so hard to like this...

I tried so hard to like this...

posted 3 months ago by jekporkins (1970)
1 reply | jump to latest

Just finished the entire thing.

I loved The Maltese Falcon. I love the French countryside. I like Clive's acting. Tie all that up in post WW2 France with a murder mystery and I don't see how it could fail. I wanted to like it so much that I ignored the problems.

It's slow. Not a slow burn, but just really slow. They have a lot of characters and subplots that really aren't that necessary. You could have cut enough fat off this thing to take away two whole episodes. Then the finale (see below) could have been stretched out so it didn't feel so darn rushed.

Honestly, two characters show up at the beginning two episodes for a scene each, then you forget about them and they show up at the ending. You have these long scenes with side characters where they talk about stuff that has nothing to do with pushing the story forward, and in the end you'll realize those scenes didn't matter. You feel like they have a movie script and decided to stretch it out to six episodes and the best way to do it is a whole lot of nonsensical filler stuff.

However, that isn't enough to not watch it. You can get by with the gorgeous locales and solid acting. This is why you shouldn't watch it.

The last episode of this might be the worst finale I've ever seen. It was as if they had four more episodes to do, ran out of money, and said, "We need to wrap this up in twenty minutes." There's a very odd shootout and then, no kidding, a new character comes out of the shadows and says, "I'm now in charge because I'm me and we are ending this with a discussion in a chalet where I tell everyone off, then we roll the end credits." You'll be thinking you just spent 5 1/2 hours for it to end like that?

[–] mobocracy (891) 2 months ago

I think these multinational productions sort of suffer from problems due to a lot of cooks in the kitchen with varying cultural influences. As well as the scheming to make a finished product with multi-national appeal so it can run in 3 countries as an original production and pay for its prestige production costs.

The too many characters problem probably results from wanting to have "enough" cast members from the production countries to help satisfy/generate audience interest as well as maybe strings attached to production money meant to promote local/national film industry or possibly even local labor rules.

I didn't mind the sprawling cast or the plot, and I sort of expect a Sam Spade story to end with a twist that makes some of the assumptions moot at the end. I mean, the Maltese Falcon showed that much of what went on was kind of a lot of energy into a McGuffin.

My bigger problem is that I just didn't love Clive Owen as Spade. Physically he's great, but whatever accent Owen was pulling off wasn't a compelling American accent and too often he seemed to slip into his native accent. Owen's unique diction is part of what sells his characters, but here there just wasn't enough American to make it work.