Terminal (2018) | Film Review

If you read the synopsis for the movie Terminal, it will leave you with the impression that we will be following two assassins on a dark mission. A teacher in the grips of an illness that will take his life, an enigmatic janitor, and a waitress leading a double life. To its credit, that is the movie you get. The problem with it is that you spend most of the movie getting to the “Why?!” of it all.

In the beginning, they lay out some horrendously VAGUE reasons. Unfortunately, those reasons are certainly not enough to keep a viewer invested in the story. Weird right? Well, let’s not beat up on the story too much. It does have some wonderfully and lovingly crafted bits of dialog, and the payoff moments do just that. Remember: you must pay attention to a lot of mess to get to it. What do you expect from writer/director Vaughn Stein? It’s only his second outing as a writer, and his strength clearly leans to visual aspects of storytelling.

The visual production of Terminal should be treated as though an alien has crashed on this planet. Sure, be nice to it, but then club it over the head, dissect it, weigh and measure its organs, stuff it and put it on your mantel. Ok, I don’t know what to do with aliens but that’s what I would do with Terminal’s visual approach. There is some magic happening here. The atmosphere comes off the screen. The use of color is mesmerizing, every character big and small is lovingly framed well enough to be hung on a wall. Sets wander from simple and tight, to dingy multicolored spatterings of light. Take the world of Sin City, something shot to look like the comic book it’s based on, then imagine what would happen if that world went several years in the future. Its as if Vaughn Stein’s thesis in creating Terminal was “I have a style in my head, I just need something to do with it”, as the visuals certainly supercedes any of the story elements.

I have a confession to make, I am not as enamored with Margot Robbie as the rest of the world seems to be. Sure, she was great as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, she was fun as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, and maybe a little sexy in Wolf of Wall Street. Big deal! Whelp, call me crazy, but I’m finally sold on her. More cynical people would call the character she plays here another “harlequin” performance, but it feels like more than that. She’s angry and driven, in control while seeming manic. It is a crazily entertaining performance.

Max Irons as Alfred ( I see what you did there) is stupid handsome, stupid, Jeremy Irons’ son…we get it, go home. Dexter Fletcher’s Vince is smarmy and tough and outshines anyone who has several feet on him…which is almost everyone. Simon Pegg’s Bill is like any other Simon Pegg performance; disarming, and relatable. Then we have Mike Myers. It’s wonderful seeing someone whom we haven’t seen much of for the last few years, but before that was a source of joy and laughter for many of us. I must ask; what’s he doing here? You might ask yourself that very same question, every time he is on screen. And I mean, every time. For me, it’s a jarring performance that removed me from the movie with each subsequent appearance. Then I would bargain with my brain to make it work “Maybe this is what happened to Austin after Goldmember? Did the Love Guru fall from grace and become this?” so many questions. It isn’t all bad though, something great happens, and we see something new, a glimmering light of what may come from this amazing thespian.

My experience watching Terminal was a fun one. In a weird way, it was a lot like watching the theatrical release of Batman vs. Superman, as I spent too much of the movie loving what my eyes were absorbing, but still asking “WHY?!” This movie can have the sound stripped from it, be completely rearranged, set it to whatever kind of music it wants, and the number of stories that could be told are endless. The dialog itself is fun and engaging, strip those down and call them shorts, interesting shorts. Terminal is a muddled mess of storytelling where the parts outweigh the sum. Nonetheless, I feel enriched for watching it.