Zeros and Ones (2021) | Film Review

“Your fear made me.”

It’s a chilling moment when that line appears midway throughout Zeros and Ones, a collaboration between renowned filmmaker Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) and one of the most celebrated actors working today, Ethan Hawke. It also functions as a bridge between fiction and our own reality, as much of Zeros and Ones intends to illuminate its audience on the issues of today for its brisk running time. A topical thriller, filmed during a global pandemic, with a high pedigree attached. So, despite this obvious influx of talent, why doesn’t the film ultimately add up?

Ethan Hawke stars as J.J. (though I cannot recall any character identifying him by name), a soldier summoned to Rome to thwart a potential terrorist bombing of the Vatican. Hawke also portrays J.J.’s twin brother, incarcerated and tortured in an undisclosed location. As J.J. attempts to stop this attack, he simultaneously seeks to learn news of his brother’s status: is he alive or dead, and does he have information that could help?

Along the way, J.J. stumbles across a mother and her child who offer information and fall into his good graces, he also becomes the victim of a weirdly out-of-place sex/blackmail scheme filmed live and at gunpoint, and the plot continues to ramble out of lucidity from there. By definition, this should be an easily decipherable story, yet Ferrara’s construct is so very back-and-forth, up-and-down that the plot becomes incomprehensible as we careen towards the end credits.

Ethan Hawke never fails to deliver his all, and Zeros and Ones is no exception. There is not a scene nor a moment where his commitment to the project is ever in doubt. Though J.J. nor his brother is given the strongest material to work with, Hawke tackles the essence of both men to deliver the strongest performance possible within the story’s meager construction.

It is those meandering and conflating ideas that hurt the film’s overall narrative. Throughout the course of Zeros and Ones, Abel Ferrara’s script becomes more focused on its attempt to inject timely conversation pieces rather than a logical flow of story. Odd choices like characters kissing with masks on (we get it, it’s a pandemic) are far too frequent, and the excessive use of close-ups detracts from any establishing of environment. For a film centered on grounding us in its augmented reality, it becomes near-impossible just to solidify your bearings on where you are at any given moment.

Abel Ferrara is a talented filmmaker, though Zeros and Ones does not deliver as the sum total of its parts. Hawke does his best and Joe Delia’s score infuses a needed intensity into the proceedings, but by the end the audience is left with far more questions and confusion than answers.