Reviews Film / Tenet

A flat, dull waste of time.

Tenet, Nolan's latest, is a great example of how gimmicks can't really save an uninteresting story. This film's particular gimmick is the "inversion" of an object along the timeline. So inverted cars drive backwards, inverted people walk and talk in reverse, and so on. Considering audiences are now used to movies with living planets and talking sea monsters, Nolan playing footage backwards isn't all that impressive.

Our hero, known only as "The Protagonist" (John David Washington), is enlisted by the mysterious organization "Tenet" to prevent Russian crime boss Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) from using the time-inversion device for nefarious purposes. Aiding the Protagonist are his fellow agent Neil (Robert Pattinson) and Sator's abused wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). They go jet-hopping around the world trying to unravel the mystery of what Sator is up to, bouncing from one exotic locale to the other in a sort of sci-fi James Bond spy adventure.

The problem is that even the average James Bond film has more complex and layered characters than Tenet does. The Protagonist is an emotionless cipher, Neil is a generic "best friend" character, and Sator is an absurd cartoon villain. Only Kat, with her tragic quest to get out from under Sator's thumb, is at all compelling. Not helping things is the acting. Branagh's overacting aside, the whole cast sleepwalks through the film, and I can't say I blame them.

The action scenes are disappointing. As I mentioned before, the time inversion isn't that interesting of a gimmick, so you can only see so many inverted bullets flying back into the guns that fired them before you get bored. The inverted fistfight is kinda cool, but the car chase midway through the film is hard to follow, with cars doing things that don't make much sense even if time has been inverted. Special mention has to go to the final action sequence, in which time-inverted good guys and normal good guys team up to battle villains that we barely catch a glimpse of on screen. I honestly couldn't tell you what Sator's goons were wearing in the final battle, because we only ever see the good guys shooting back at them.

The sound is also poor. Characters mumble their dialogue, and time-inverted characters must wear special gas masks to help them breathe in reverse, so it becomes even harder to understand what they're saying. Good luck following the convoluted time-travel plot when characters mumble through an explosive action sequence.

Tenet is a mess, with dull characters, lousy action sequences, and a host of other problems. And since the time-inversion plot point is so unimpressive, I'm not sure I can even call Tenet an ambitious mess. Skip it and go rewatch Nolan's Batman movies instead.