Hail, Caesar!

Hail, Caesar! follows Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix, a 1950s Hollywood fixer, as he attempts to juggle a variety of problems and mishaps among his various stars, with the movie tracking the movements of, for example, a kidnapped performer (George Clooney’s Baird Whitlock), an exasperated filmmaker (Ralph Fiennes’ Laurence Laurentz), and an unwed, pregnant starlet (Scarlett Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran). Directors Joel and Ethan Coen have infused Hail, Caesar! with a thoroughly idiosyncratic, far-from-crowd-pleasing sensibility that fares rather well at the outset, as the Coens emphasize a series of vignettes revolving around several old-school Hollywood productions (eg a splashy Busby Berkeley-style musical, a melodramatic weeper, a Roy Rogers-like Western, etc, etc). These sequences are undeniably quite enjoyable and contribute heavily to the movie’s initial atmosphere of good-natured fun, and yet it’s clear even during this portion of the proceedings that the Coens’ inability to offer up a single well-defined protagonist is, to put it mildly, problematic (ie despite Brolin’s solid work, Mannix remains a wholly one-dimensional figure from beginning to end). It’s only as Hail, Caesar! enters its momentum-free midsection that one’s interest begins to seriously flag, with the sketch-comedy vibe paving the way for a progressively erratic second half that boasts few wholeheartedly compelling attributes (ie there is, to an increasingly palpable extent, nothing here designed to hold the viewer’s attention) – which ensures that the movie fizzles out considerably before reaching its anticlimactic finish (thus confirming its place as just another promising yet underwhelming effort from the Coen siblings).

** out of ****