- Title: Terminal
- IMDb: link
Both a critical and box office failure, writer/director Vaughn Stein‘s stylish neo-noir thriller is more notable for the look of the film than anything else. The convoluted plot, which relies on two late twists and extended monologuing to the audience in the final ten minutes to tie the disparate threads of the story together, involves a cast of characters including a waitress (Margot Robbie), English teacher (Simon Pegg), and pair of assassins (Max Irons and Dexter Fletcher) who keep coming back to a rundown train station for reasons even they don’t understand.
Robbie, who was obviously hired for her role of Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad to provide that same macabre-style zaniness, gets the play the film’s femme fatale. Sadly, any mystery to the character is immediately undercut by both the film’s opening sequence, spelling out her role in the film, and clumsy foreshadowing which clues the audience in far too much about the character earlier than the script is ready for.
The plot, which involves moving the hitmen back and forth from a motel, to a strip club, to the terminal’s diner, without ever accomplishing much, involving hidden suitcases and a series of phone calls, is a waste of time for both the characters on-screen and the audience. And the number of twists and revelations in the film’s final act would be enough to make even M. Night Shyamalan blush.
The best aspect of the film is working the actors’ names into neon signs around the city in the opening credits. Robbie and Pegg make the best of the awkward dialogue the pair have to deliver, involving how the terminally-ill teacher could kill himself, which is really all that holds the movie together for most of its 95-minute running time. The rest of the cast, however, should scrub this one from their resumes. The pair of hitmen are derivative of even the weakest Tarantino homage, and an overacting Mike Myers also stars as the terminal’s night watchman with a secret, like that of Robbie, you’ll likely guess fairly early from paying marginal attention to the story unfolding. Terminal is aptly named as it is indeed dead on arrival.
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