As I watched this all I could keep thinking about was a Talking Heads song. You know the one. It’s about being on the road to nowhere. Never before have so many opportunities been squandered so callously.
What starts out as a possible thriller involving a married man named Eddie (David Wenham) being sprayed with pesticides, quickly switches gears and becomes a love story/family drama about a man whose life is slowly going down the toilet. Not in any spectacular way, either. Nope, this family is just running out of money, and Eddie is about to find himself fired. Of course, there’s this childhood friend named Amanda (Sarah Wynter), who seems like she could be a love interest, but that fizzles, too. Throw in some homeless people, a few dogs and some really pointless coincidences, and you remember why real life sometimes makes for a boring film.
I wanted to like this. I kept expecting the pesticide plot line to come back and haunt Eddie. I even thought there might be some connection to his daughter’s sudden illness. I was wrong, and as I watched the clock get closer to the advertised running time (89 minutes, which couldn’t come soon enough), I realized the film couldn’t end properly. But then the movie bypassed its listed running time, going almost two hours and before ending abruptly and badly.
Steer far clear of this film … unless you like having your time given all the respect of a dead Beta fish.
