ihavebeenfloated

I’m going to warn you in advance, I’m feeling sassy and this movie pissed me off, so this might get a bit harsh and unprofessional. Course, when I have ever been professional?

I wanted to see The Constant Gardener from the moment I saw the poster. It’s a really cool poster. It’s got Ralph Fiennes looking kind of haggard, tense, beaten down, and a silhouette of him holding a gun out into the air like he’s a man who has finally reached his final straw. The title is pretty cool, too, sort of inspiring a weird poetic feeling in me, making me want to figure out what the hell the title has to do with the movie at all, since I read it was about a dead wife and Africa and something.

Blame ignorance, but I tried to be well informed. I had decided not to see it after the initial reviews said it was boring and heavy handed. Then, more reviews came in, and the response seemed generally favorable. I told Amanda that I wanted to see it, and we agreed that it had a cool poster.

Well, I hate to spoil anything for you people, but…

1.) The title has nothing to do with anything. Ralph’s character spends a few moments of the film obsessed with plants. That’s about it. It hasn’t any deep significance to anything that occurs within the film. You can’t even probe deep into the psyche of the character and see any significance, really, unless you really stretch it.

2.) He never, not once, holds a gun out into the air, or points it at anything. This is to tell you that this movie is not suspenseful in any way, there are no action scenes, or even him just snapping and waving a gun around. Nothing. Sure, he has a gun at one point, but he never points it at anyone, anything, nor does he even just wave it around in a lunatic fashion.

The first half the movie is told mostly in flashbacks about how he met his wife. His wife is dead in the first five minutes. Then we kind of find out that his wife is into Africa in a big way, well, they all are. They’re all like, “Woohoo, Africa!” through the whole film, and if you’re like me, you don’t give a shit about Africa really, so this film that consists mostly of two hours of bashing the fact that Africa is a shitty place due to Evil White People fucking shit up, well… it probably wasn’t made with me in mind.

I’m not trying to sound like I don’t care about Amnesty International. It’s not that I don’t care about Africa.

Well, wait, no. I guess I don’t care about Africa.

But I’m not an asshole. I can understand that shit sucks in Africa. I can understand that, yes, Africans are exploited. I’m taking a goddamn college history class, yeah, I totally get that Africans are exploited throughout history.

But holy shit, why the fuck do we need a two hour long movie that promises something awesome, that actually only delivers on pounding the fact that drug companies are evil in Africa into your head repetitively until you start drooling on yourself and mumbling, “must… save… Africa…,” over and over again?

So, that’s The Constant Gardener for you. It really is just that. It’s just two hours of the same ridiculous crap over and over again, with a few characters and a plot that tries really hard to be sort of mysterious and suspenseful but fails miserably.

I want my two hours back.