Crimes of the Future

An often astonishingly tedious endeavor, Crimes of the Future follows several characters, including Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser and Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, as they contend with a futuristic landscape in which human bodies have changed dramatically. Filmmaker David Cronenberg, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a perpetually underwhelming and uninvolving piece of work that contains little in the way of accessible, attention-grabbing elements, as the movie, which runs a punishingly protracted 107 minutes, seems to transpire almost exclusively within dimly-lit, exceedingly unpleasant sets and features scarcely-developed characters engaging in discussions and conversations of an astonishingly dull nature – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by the total lack of forward momentum and absence of compelling performances. (Mortensen fares especially poorly, ultimately, as the actor growls and coughs his way through the entire production.) And although Cronenberg deserves some credit for his ambition, Crimes of the Future, for the most part, comes off as an abject failure that squanders the potential afforded by its premise and dystopian environment (ie there’s a kernel of a good idea here, admittedly.)

1/2* out of ****