The Last Thing He Wanted Movie Review
Brad Sturdivant
March 25th, 2020
There’s a common trend among some of the lesser quality Netflix movies of suffering mightily from poor editing and bad pacing. THE LAST THING HE WANTED suffers from both, but the problems don’t stop there. This is an unwatchable mess of a movie, seemingly told by someone that didn’t comprehend the source material or understand how to translate the story to film. A little credit has to be given to Anne Hathaway, who goes all-in with her performance, but given how poor the overall film is, a surprisingly not bad performance doesn’t carry much weight.
Anne Hathaway is Elena, a seasoned reporter that’s focused on uncovering a government conspiracy in South America. We open with her and her photographer best friend (Perez) following a group of militants around and snapping pictures while Elena narrates nonsensically. To be clear, this opening scene means absolutely nothing to the film. It sort of shows Elena is an experienced journalist, but it’s a waste of time since it never comes into play again. We flash forward a bit and pick up with Elena back in the States where she gets into an argument with her boss and then gets put on the re-election coverage. Once again, this whole scene and the subsequent scenes of Elena in different cities, means absolutely nothing to the overall story. By this time, we’ve wasted over 30 minutes of film and haven’t even gotten to the main plot.
The main plot jumps in when we meet Elena’s estranged father Dick (Willem Dafoe). We don’t know much about him, but he’s caught up in some sort of illegal arms deal. It’s hard when the camera focuses on him because he has some brain damage, so nothing he says makes sense. But Elena takes pity on him and decides to step in and help him complete his totally illegal arms deal in South America, where she agrees to fly down there, give some bad guys some guns and take money back to Florida. All by herself. Once there, the bad guys shockingly refuse to pay her and so she decides to stay there until…we’re not sure. She doesn’t really search for money and every interaction she has with anyone leads to nothing. But she’s there and it doesn’t seem like she can return home without help.
So where does Ben Affleck fit in? You saw him get second billing for his five minutes of work, so he must be important. He’s some sort of CIA spy, but his character makes zero sense. One minute he’s talking to a politician in Washington DC and the next he’s talking to Elena in South America. They try to pin all the bad stuff on him, but it’s done so lazily and halfheartedly that we just don’t care.
When I say nothing makes sense, I want to stress that every decision Elena makes is unjustified and confusing for the audience. Hathaway sells it as best she can and makes the audience believe she’s under pressure and stress, but without motivations, the audience is left confused. And once Elena gets stranded in South America, every plot point from that point forward is nonsensical. She somehow ends up with fake passports, ditches some drugs, ends up working at a hotel, meets some spies, sleeps with a spy, calls home a few times and spends a lot of time waiting around. And when I re-read that sentence, it actually sounds interesting, but believe me when I say that it is not. This film has a way of taking things that are normally interesting and making them terrible. The biggest struggle for the audience is to resist the urge to throw something at the screen when you realize there is no payoff for the two hours you’ve invested in this film.
The good news for everyone involved is that Netflix has a sneaky way of hiding their terrible movies deep in their queue and the only way people are going to remember this in six months is if they search for one of the actors.
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