A mess of enormous proportions is Mindcagewhich has just premiered in Netflix and it is already the number 1 movie on the streaming giant’s most viewed list.
Where to start, there being so many variants to enter this film with John Malkovich y Martin Lawrence? One, perhaps the most obvious because it is the most evident, is a (bad) copy or tracing or plagiarism of The silence of the inocentswith Malkovich as Hannibal Lecter, the imprisoned murderer who will give clues to a detective (the young Canadian Melissa Roxbourgh), who also has his disorder from the past.
When the female corpses begin to add up in an unidentified American city, the police understand, or believe, that it is a copycat of an ancient serial killer. Five years ago, the Artist (Malkovich) had been arrested after carrying out murders, let’s say, done with an artistic perspective. The corpses are presented, then and now, as if they were sculptures.
One of the detectives who is now investigating the new deaths is Jack Doyle (Martin Lawrence, whom we are more used to seeing in comedies or the saga of Bad Boys with slapper Will Smith). The guy makes a I-can’t-believe-it face when he finds out that the police chief plans to have the Artist interviewed. The idea is: the guy must have some data that serves as a clue, a clue, to catch the copier. And even, in one of those, he tells him off for trying to imitate him and is not up to par with him.
The Artist draws like Michelangelo, and has a particularity for portraying, with black pencil, those around him. Here I gave you a clue.
Jack was after the Artist five years ago, and there is a death, that of a companion, that has him a little upset.
Just as Lawrence plays at being serious and it turns out horribly, Malkovich, known for going over the top, and this role made sense for it, seems content.
The usually comedian Martin Lawrence and Melissa Roxbourgh analyze the wings of an “angel”, made into sculpture.All this would be the work of the screenwriter and director of this mental cage, the Italian Mauro Borrelli (no, not Boselli like the former Estudiantes de La Plata player, who, poor thing, has nothing to do with it). Art illustrator for films, from Beyond Dreams, through The 8 most hated and the Dumbo by Tim Burton, evidently has among his favorite films the latest winner of the 5 most important Oscar awards (film, direction, leading actors and adapted screenplay).
If you go to the end, the confusion will reach its breaking point in the last minutes of the screening.But just as there is a murderer who would be copying another, Borrelli is not, he does not succeed in being Jonathan Demme, and he copies – some will say that he pays homage – some sequences, and even shots. Watch how Mary shows the file to the Artist in prison, or (single spoiler alert, which isn’t that big of a deal either) how the agents enter a home to find the killer, but it’s the wrong address. Same as The silence of the inocents.
But the film is bad even technically. Look at the shots and reverse shots of Jack driving and Mary as a passenger, and what is seen behind the windows is a poorly resolved chroma (sometimes it even seems that the car is going faster when it focuses on one than the other).
The psychological thriller has its rules, its twists, and Mindcage It doesn’t provide anything at all to encourage you to sit down and watch it. Even though it lasts just over an hour and a half, because it seems twice as long.
Suspense/Horror. United States, 2022. 96′, SAM 16. Of: Mauro Borrelli. Con: John Malkovich, Melissa Roxbourgh, Martin Lawrence. Available in: Netflix.