The Rough With The Smooth

Joel and Ethan Cohen are fairly hit and miss when it comes to their output. They started off like a house on fire releasing 8 cult movies between 1984 and 2000 from Blood Simple through to O Brother Where Art Thou and everything inbetween they really could do no wrong.

From there the wheels came off a little as they released The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty and The Lady Killers before returning to form with 2007's No Country For Old Men. Then it was back to the wrong side of great with Burn After Reading, True Grit and A Serious Man. In 2013 they released another less than stellar movie in the form of Inside Llewyn Davis and this then leads us to their most recent film Hail Caesar which could very well be their most devisive work to date.

Now before I get to Caesar I should point out that even the Cohen movies that I have labelled as not great are not bad films. Its just that when you make movies like The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink and Fargo you set the bar pretty high so anything that doesn't reach those same heady levels is going to come across as a disappointment and fairly substandard in comparison.

So we come to this years Hail Caesar which is set in Hollywood in the 1950's and centres around a day in the life of Capitol Pictures fixer Eddie Mannix. Eddies job is to make sure the studios stars are behaving themselves and to keep their dirty laundry out of the press. In Hail Caesar he has to deal with famous actor Baird Whitlock, young Western star Hobie Doyle and actress DeeAnna Moran.

DeeAnna is pregnant but not married, Hobie is being put into a period drama that has him completely out of his depth and Baird is kidnapped by communists who hold him to a $100,000 ransom.

Mannix is the common thread that interweaves the three plots as he juggles his own future with trying his best to clean up the messes he is confronted with. The multiple stories come together well as you would expect from master craftsmen like the Cohens and with a cast that includes the likes of George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson and Josh Brolin you do get some great performances its just that it doesn't really come across as enough. By that I mean that the film doesn't really go anywhere and in all honesty I found myself bored by the whole viewing experience which is something I never thought I would say about a film directed by the men who crafted my favourite movie of all time (Lebowski).

But if I'm being honest nothing really works in Hail Caesar for me. Yes it beautifully shot and yes the dialogue is great and it is obvious that this in some ways is a love letter to the old Hollywood studio system but I cannot get away from the feeling that the movie is just dull, dull, dull and that really saddens me to say.

So in conclusion. Is Hail Caesar as bad as some of the Cohens other lesser works? No it most certainly is not. When compared to the likes of The Lady Killers theres alot to like but it does not come anywhere close to the heights that we all know the directors can reach and for that reason alone I cannot give Hail Caesar any more than 5 out of 10.