Mercy Road
The latest film from director John Curran has a compelling hook, one that a lot of films has played before, but for all its moments of propulsive suspense, it feels like it plays too loose with reality to be taken too seriously as a thriller. “Mercy Road” reminds me a lot of John Woo’s recent “Silent Night,” also about a father whose focus on their child in absolutely on point, but whereas I feel like Woo embraced the absurdity of his narrative while landing the emotions, Curran has one tone he is aiming for here, and it’s kind of a dull one, not aided by how his main character is played by Luke Bracey as an absolute madman from moment one.
When “Mercy Road” opens, Tom (Bracey) is driving away from a house. He is a manic disaster, with blood on him, as he tries to race to his daughter, Ruby (Martha Kate Morgan). His ex-wife, Terri (Alex Malone), is furiously calling him trying to get a sense of how Ruby is- she thinks he has kidnapped her. Emergency services is trying to call him; his job is trying to call him; and he eventually gets into discussions with Ruby’s friend and her boyfriend. But the calls that offer the most in terms of clues is a mysterious associate (Toby Jones) who offers him the chance to find her after he disrupted a transaction of his.
As I said, “Mercy Road” has a hook we’ve seen a lot of times before, but rarely have they been played at the fevered pitch of Panos Cosmatos’s “Mandy,” as a hallucinatory nightmare that makes us question how much of the film is real and how much is in Tom’s head. Stylistically, it feels like Curran is trying too hard to be George Miller or John Woo rather than finding his own way visually into this film. Curran’s films (including “The Painted Vail” and “We Don’t Live Here Anymore”) have a focus on characters and building the world around the protagonists that this film just does not seem interested in. This isn’t to say that I was completely checked out of the film- I think the story has some interesting ideas and story beats- but I don’t think the film can blend them into a cohesive narrative that makes sense in a logical way. I do like the energy of the film, but unfortunately, I feel like it falls short by being too immersed in what it wants to do in terms of style, and too clever in its structure to just focus on telling a straightforward story that grabs us. The result is a film that feels like less than the sum of its parts.
