Muddled and unclear, Uncertainty is an understatement.
Muddled and unclear,
Uncertainty is an understatement.
We
best get used to seeing Joseph Gordon
Levitt as something of an action star. It’s all that Christopher
Nolan’s fault for allowing him to go all zero gravity on us in Inception. So not only will we see him in The Dark Knight Rises followed by Sci-fi thriller Looper and finally as a courier in
action thriller Premium Rush. The days of Third Rock From The Sun are firmly behind this former childhood
actor. Slipping more under the
radar, no doubt due to more indie origins, is Uncertainty. A film that, based on the poster and
trailer, would seem to be another case for Levitt running around, totting guns
and dealing with bad guys. It’s
nothing of the sort. But to
describe what it actually is will leave you all kinds of confused.
Young
lovers Bobby (Gordon Levitt) and Kate (Lynn
Collins) find themselves deeply in love and facing a life changing
decision. Unable to make it they
decide to flip a coin. Heads they
go to Brooklyn, tails they go to Manhattan. The narrative then splits in two as we follow Bobby and Kate
down the separate trajectories fate has deemed to send them. In one they attend Kate’s family’s 4th
July party, in the other they find a mobile phone in the back of a cab and are
pursed through the city in the hope of selling it to the highest bidder.
If
you are thinking this has the potential to be a more tense Sliding Doors
affair, forget it. The premise of
a split narrative, directly commenting on each other, is where that comparison
ends. Uncertainty is a film with
no idea of what it is trying to achieve.
For the most part it feels as if the film was shot with no care or
attention to anything resembling a script.
Directors
Scott McGehee and David Siegel have an interesting eye for colour, the two
storylines being clearly identifiable by a yellow or green hue to everything
within them, and there are moments of genuine intimacy well executed between
Bobby and Kate. The problems arise
when you fail to care about anything that happens on screen. We don’t care what’s on the phone that
everyone wants, we don’t care that Bobby and Kate now have a surrogate child in
the form of a stray dog and we don’t care about their future together.
Gordon
Levitt is always an interesting screen presence and does little to muddy that
reputation here, despite the script’s best efforts. He does what is asked of him and arguably instils much more
subtext in Bobby than there ever was on the page. Lynn Collins meanwhile oozes sexy out of every pore. She was hot as the alien princess in
John Carter but here we see an earthy sexual presence and when her and Gordon
Levitt are together on screen, without him literally dragging her round New
York by his jacket, there is interesting chemistry. It’s just a shame the film couldn’t find something more
engaging to do with the spark.
Despite
some solid visuals and two on form actors Uncertainty does exactly what it says
on the tin. It has no idea what
it’s trying to be or trying to say.
You’d be better off flipping a coin to figure out what film to see other
than this one.