The Last Thing He Wanted

As if that weren’t bad enough, the story structure is also in bad shape. There’s also a slipshod attempt at a romantic subplot between Affleck and Hathaway that has zero chemistry and almost no preamble to how it could even work. While Edi Gathegi is great as Jones, the character is more vague than mysterious.

“…goes off on several tangents that don’t ever conclude.”

Basically, I think The Last Thing He Wanted is trying to be too many things at once. It goes off on several tangents that don’t ever conclude. Neither Hathaway or Affleck come across as likable in, and maybe that’s the point, but it made it difficult to care about what happened to them. The good things about this movie are the technical aspects: the cinematography by Bobby Bukowski, the production design by Inbal Weinberg, and the costume design by Ane Crabtree.

I tried really hard to like this film but kept getting bored and let down by it. I always feel terrible to give a movie a bad review because I know how much work goes into making them, but this one just never reached me in any way. I am looking forward to the next Dee Rees film as I imagine it’ll be leaps and bounds better than this one.

The Last Thing He Wanted screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.