Wander

Directed by April Mullen, Wander follows Aaron Eckhart’s mentally-unstable private investigator Arthur Bretnik as he arrives in the title small town to look into a mysterious death and subsequently finds himself drawn into a far-reaching conspiracy. It’s a promising setup that’s employed to increasingly underwhelming and flat-out unwatchable effect by Mullen, which is a shame, certainly, given that the filmmaker kicks the proceedings off with a compelling, intriguing opening stretch that benefits substantially from a typically commanding performance by Eckhart. (And it’s clear, too, that the picture’s auspicious vibe is heightened by the efforts of an eclectic supporting cast that includes Tommy Lee Jones and Heather Graham.) There’s little doubt, then, that Wander‘s transformation into a seriously misguided piece of work is triggered by a progressively tedious midsection, as Mullen, working from Tim Doiron’s screenplay, stresses Arthur’s mostly dialogue-free exploits to a degree that quickly (and perhaps inevitably) becomes oppressive – with the arms-length atmosphere exacerbated by a growing emphasis on Arthur’s crumbling mental state (ie the viewer isn’t entirely sure how much of this is actually happening and how much is a product of Arthur’s conspiracy-addled psyche). And while the conclusion effectively (and satisfactorily) wraps everything up, Wander has long-since cemented its place as an often astonishingly tiresome and interminable misfire that does, in the end, come off as a vastly inferior riff on Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory.

* out of ****