Sometimes a sci-fi movie just barely misses the mark. Maybe it didn`t hit quite the right tone, or it failed to provide satisfying answers to the thought-provoking questions it proposed. There are plenty of science fiction films that we enjoy despite their flaws, because there`s some good in them, too. And then there`s Mute.From Netflix and Duncan Jones, Mute promised to be a return to form for the director and writer behind the instant classic 2009 mind-bender Moon (and, more recently, the less-than-classic Warcraft). Unfortunately, Mute is a cartoonish, nonsensical, tone-deaf, derivative, outrageously awful nightmare without a single redeeming quality. Bummer, right?From beginning to end, Mute is simply hard to watch. It starts when a young Amish boy named Leo suffers a terrible boating accident that leaves his vocal cords permanently shredded. As an adult, Leo (Alexander Skarsgard) has emigrated to Germany. A brief fly-by on a newspaper clipping clumsily tells us that the German chancellor invited American Amish to relocate there en masse to bring a sense of `tradition` back to the country, and that`s all the explanation we ever get for that.After several early scenes of drippy, melodramatic flirting that would make Tommy Wiseau cringe, Leo sets out on a mission to find his missing girlfriend, a blue-haired cocktail waitress named Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh, whose acting is ridiculously, terribly over the top). Meanwhile, Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd, sporting an absurdly huge handlebar mustache) is an AWOL American soldier who does under-the-table surgeries for the mob in the hopes of getting papers for him and his daughter to return home. His friend Duck Teddington (Justin Theroux in an insanely bad wig) is also around, for reasons that become horrifyingly clear as the movie progresses.Let`s get one thing out of the way: Leo being Amish has absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever, and so boils down to a pointless, distracting, silly quirk. He works as a bartend ...
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