The opening credits show names I know, like Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi: well, the first plays an important figure, yes, with a heavy accent and big mustache like a character from the 70s, while the latter plays a crazy man who in a couple of scenes we see blabbing nonsense and who is of no use at all.
The opening credits don’t show his name, but it’s all over the internet that Jim Carrey is in it and plays the Hermit, otherwise I wouldn’t have known, with that big beard and everything. It’s a small but important role, and a strange one: he’s not part of any group, he goes alone where he pleases with his supermarket-cart full of his stuff, and saves the lives of the two protagonists. He never speaks, and I found it bizarre at first but then I smiled when he gave a snowball to the character that had just told him that he was lost and didn’t know which way to go..
The story: undesired people are thrown out of Texas without compliments, they’re called the bad batch and are left in the desert, a no-man’s-land where people try to survive as they can.
We follow Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), who starts walking, finds and abandoned car and uses the mirror to put on lipstick, and tries to run when a car approaches but is taken. Of course, she was on foot running forward in the desert, it’s not like she ever had a chance.
She’s chained to the ground while we hear the song “all that she wants”, and then a woman comes to saw her right arm and leg, in order to eat them. We see that there is a group of people who trains like bodybuilders, and there are weaker people chained down as meat. Arlen manages to kill the woman and escape using a skateboard, until she stops exhausted; luckily the Hermit finds her, and brings her to Comfort with his cart. The story moves to “5 months later”, where she’s been given an artificial leg (and a very good one, when she has it on you don’t notice the difference, it seems like her own leg :-p) and appears to be in otherwise good health. There is the crazy man Bobby (Ribisi) walking around shouting nonsense like ‘there’s only one thing you must never forget’ but he doesn’t know what it is.
Among the cannibals there is a guy with Miami Man tattooed on his chest (Jason Momoa); he makes a beautiful drawing of a child, his daughter, and then goes outside to kill a pleading and crying girl for dinner, while listening to Karma Chameleon. We see him slicing the meat, cooking it and eating it.
Arlen is so upset about her new condition that she wants some kind of revenge; she loads a gun and goes out; she finds an injured woman and kills her, sparing the child and taking her to Comfort.
She gives the child a pet rabbit and teaches her how to apply make-up, since she can’t do it to herself with only one arm. Together they go to a rave, where The Dream’s women give drugs to everyone. She takes the acid too, and doesn’t see that the Dream finds the child alone and takes her in.
MiamiMan is searching everywhere for the child, after finding the body of the woman, and he asks the hermit if he knows where she is. He knows, he saw the child following the girl. The hermit writes “find comfort” on the man’s notepad after he has drawn him - and very well too, that’s definitely something he wasn’t going to find anywhere!
Arlen goes out into the desert, still under the effect of the acid, and Miami Man finds her. When she comes back to herself, he tells her that he doesn’t care about anything or anybody except that child, and that he’ll kill her unless she helps him find her. He trades her with another man for fuel, then he kills the man, and takes one of his arms, his scooter and the girl with him.
He helps her during a sandstorm, then they talk (he comes from Cuba and went to Miami to work), and she shows him her tattooes, and then she takes his knife, tells him she hates him, because he’s a cannibal and therefore evil: “that’s what you are, evil”. He says she doesn’t see things clearly for what they are out there, but then a man comes and shoots him, and takes her back to Comfort.
She goes right back looking for him but finds only his notebook, not him. The hermit finds him, not dead yet, and saves him. We see him catching a bird to give him something to eat and burn money in the fire.
Arlen makes copies of the drawings of the child but nobody knows where she is, until Arlen sees her herself, with some pregnant women.
The hermit brings MiamiMan to his scooter and leaves him there with a snowball.
The Dream lives with all the comforts: a big house with comfortable beds and bathtubs, even with a swimming pool. He gives the child spaghetti to eat, and his women have machine guns.
Arlen goes to see him. The women make drugs in there. He tells her that there are people who eat his “sons and daughters” but here he won’t let it happen, and when she sort of says she’d like to stay he gives her a nice, big room; she has a gun hidden in her artificial foot, and uses it to take a woman hostage in exchange for the child. The Dream says “is this really necessary?” and I wondered the same thing.
She goes away with the child, and what do you know, she sees MiamiMan riding straight in her direction - he wasn’t that lost after all. The child runs to hug him. He tells Arlen that she did her part and is now free to go back, but she won’t, she asks him if he wants to hang out or something. He tells her it’s not a place for her out there, and she replies that “I like it here”, but we know exactly what she likes, right there. The child starts crying that she’s hungry and she wants spaghetti, so while Arlen covers her eyes MiamiMan kills her pet rabbit and they sat around a fire to eat it. The adults looking at each other, the child almost crying.
What an ending, huh? :-/
Now, will someone explain to me how this people get on, where they find all those things, the fuel, the functioning copy-machines and the electricity to make it work, the weapons, the music, and how can the Dream live so richly?
Those other guys seem to have no other options than eating people, and yet they have pasta and lots of stuff... there’s no money, and apparently no connection with the civilized world, so where does all that come from?
Also, has the Dream been there only a few months or what? There are a few pregnant women but there are no children around...
They make drugs for what purpose? They don’t sell it, it’s just to make people high for a night?
In spite of her words, Arlen looks at MiamiMan like someone thinking ‘where else am I ever gonna find someone looking like that??’, so there’s no doubt about what she likes, out there.
Now, if you look at pictures of this movie, or at the trailer, it seems even kind of cool, because every shot is rather beautiful in itself: the framing, the light, it’s all very cool, if you think of it in terms of photographs or single shots, but as a whole movie it’s extremely boring.
I won’t ask why they needed famous actors like Reeves and specially Carrey, because it’s rather obvious that big names bring more audience (watch me, I see Carrey’s name, I watch the movie), but it’s still not clear why they had Ribisi in such a useless role.
Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t get it, in which case, please enlighten me. I’d rather read interesting comments about it rather than watching it again.
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