“Easy’s Waltz”, the beginnings of Nic PizzoLto’s functionalities, is the type of confusing failure that lets you question the judgment and talent of all the people involved. Because nothing, not writing, direction or play, does not even work at a distance.
It is a catastrophe sealed in pressure from a film where no one intervened to avoid the disaster, and you are now trapped inside while he stumbles from a random scene to the other, without even the slightest sense of vision or a glimpse of his characters. It is a fascinating watch in the abstract, but which barely holds together at a basic narrative level, and it almost has the impression that it was made by a person entirely different from that which worked on the acclaimed series “True Detective”.
You might expect a game of vegas at the old school, but it is more a copy derived from countless other Sin City -set films that you have seen before – including “The Last Showgirl” from last year. The references are broken together, and so few care provided are given to its characters that you leave by asking yourself with who even if you spent all this time.
The song of Vince Vaughn and the dialogue of the film are just as hollow, despite the insistence of the film that all this is in fact great, would make a great comedy if all the experience was not such an obstacle.
It is like a tracing of what a film should be like this, forcing the spectator to satiate himself and to fold to see what he was going even before realizing that the effort is futile. Even when there is the rare and severe isolated line, everything is lost in the song of a note which is the rest of the film.
It all starts with Easy (Vaughn), a crooner of Vegas who has never done despite his supposed talents (an already doubtful affirmation that the film treats like a fact) and fell in fairly difficult moments after losing his job to manage a restaurant after hitting a drunk jerk that harassed his staff. But he soon catches a lucky break: a neighboring club needs someone to fill at night to replace an actor (rightly played by Shane Gillis) who bombed on the left and right.
When Easy goes up to the microphone and ceases from certain songs, he draws the attention of the former interpreter Mickey Albano (Al Pacino) who now directs entertainment for the Wynn Resort. Mickey offers easy to play work at the complex, and he starts to make a name for himself as an essential singer. Unfortunately, the brother of Easy Sam’s disorders (Simon Rex) arrives, threatening to upset this good thing, he has been running and stealing his dream again.
Alas, the film mainly deprives us of our time and never makes a convincing case for its own existence.
The singing scenes are awkwardly staged and without real life behind them. And the dialogue, never natural, is a series of painfully stiff lines as they should have taken another catch. And it all depends too much on an awkward exhibition, or on characters who telegrade so clearly that something important is about to happen so clearly that his arrival simply causes an uptop of shoulders. Was it a stylistic choice? Or just what we see was the best they could get?
Everything in “Easy’s Waltz” takes place with such tired and compulsory inevitability, it almost seems that PizzoLto tries to draw one on us. But instead of being funny or at least entertaining, it’s just exhausting. The sub -intrigues were picked up and fell with little reflection on one of them, leaving such a strange feeling of a cervical boost for a film where almost nothing really happens.
When we obtain a quick series of time and location jumps near the end of which there is then kicks, “Easy’s Waltz” loses whatever the possible potential that it should have ended on a high note. It is like a bad cover of a song that you heard before, just leaving you by wishing you can return to the original and drive it out of your mind.
Read our whole cover of the Toronto Film Festival here.
