Watching the noir-ish sci-fi movie “Mute,” from English filmmaker Duncan Jones (“Source Code,” “Warcraft“), I couldn’t help wondering about the intended audience the director made the film for, and whether I’d spent the last few years awaiting its 16-years-in-the-making release in vain. Watching its credits, I didn’t need to wonder. “Mute” attempts to take Jones back to the type of filmmaking of 2009 when his feature debut, “Moon,” premiered, dazzled us and proclaimed the helmer a new and exciting talent to watch. There’s a caveat, though. Where “Moon” stands out from its references, “Mute” is mostly beholden to them, reflecting those quotations regardless of Jones’ efforts to fold them into his own point of view. It’s the child of “Blade Runner” as much as it’s the child of all socially conscious science fiction. But then it’s also an adolescent still in awe of its father and without any of the wisdom that creates depth.
“Mute” is also the dysfunctional victim of a severe identity crisis and a mystery with virtually no suspense to it. Jones’ setting is Berlin, 40 years into a stock neon-tinted future where all is bright and shiny in keeping with the recycled “Blade Runner” aesthetic. His hero is Leo (a vacant Alexander Skarsgård), the titular aphonic character and an Amish bartender; two words that go together about as well as “sex-positive Pope.” He’s in a relationship with Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh), who waits tables at the same bar. They’re a cute couple. He’s a big, lanky sweetie pie, and the script goes out of its way to establish him as a perfect beau, mostly by having Naadirah say so out loud; the exposition grates but when Skarsgård gets to interact with Saleh one on one, their chemistry starts percolating. It never goes anywhere beyond that, though, because Naadirah suddenly vanishes right from under Leo’s nose and forces him out into Berlin’s noisy, lonely streets to figure out what happened to her.
That’s movie number one. Movie number two runs parallel, following the story of Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck Teddington (Justin Theroux), two opportunistic American ex-pat street surgeons who patch up bad guys, perform ad-hoc body modifications, and on occasion, torture people too when the price is right. Duck is a big, unabashed pervert; Bill is a big, unabashed asshole, but he’s also Paul Rudd, which means he’s a great dad to his young daughter if rough around the edges. He wants to get the hell out of Berlin and spends his time trying to finagle passports and all necessary accouterments for his departure. What he has to do with Leo and Naadirah is, of course, a mystery right up to the film’s last twenty minutes or so, but suffice to say they butt heads as their respective quests repeatedly collide with one another.
“Mute” is an object lesson in the need for self-editing in narrative fiction of any stripe. By trying to do everything, the film ends up saying next to nothing. Grant that Jones has spent his last two stints in the director’s chair making blockbuster fan fiction (“Warcraft“) and a commercialized version of a Jones movie (“Source Code“). Maybe it shouldn’t come as a shock or a disappointment that “Mute” is such a cluster.
There’s an unearned confidence in “Mute.” It’s the kind of self-satisfied movie that, rather than fixing its POV and structural issues, believe it’s clever to put a winky reference to “Moon” in its background because it’s 2018 and everything has to exist in a shared universe for no reason other than Marvel did it. If nothing else “Mute” takes better aim at exploring deep, personal, human experiences as shaped by a tech-centric culture, making it a piece with the expectations Jones set for himself in 2009. But this has the unintended consequence of making overt connections to “Moon” all the more puzzling. Blame Hollywood’s franchise industrial complex. Blame Jones, too. For a movie that’s been stuck in development hell for ages, “Mute” feels like a first draft begging for focus.
Jones’ aspirations are off the charts and or simply misguided, it’s hard to tell. Rather than make one film, he made two, possibly even three, and mushed them together into one lumbering attempt at large-scale genre filmmaking with an otherwise intimate core. One can respect the ambition, the muddled results less so.
The setup is stale, but not stale enough that “Mute” couldn’t work once it moves past its introductions and gets to the plot. The real quandary is that Jones has a problem and spends the whole picture struggling to solve it: What the hell is “Mute” actually about? It’s stuffed with ideas and weighed down by too many perspectives. Is it Skarsgård’s movie? Is it Rudd’s movie? Is it about being an outsider in a place that doesn’t care about you? Is it about coming from a technophobic background in an increasingly tech-oriented society? Of these, that last thread feels juiciest, but “Mute” steps back from making the most of that theme on anything other than a surface level.
Leo’s isolation is both self-imposed and inflicted on him by the cruel circumstances of his youth. The opening scene shows us how, as a child, he suffered physical injuries that left him voiceless because his mother refused medical care on religious grounds. That’s a story. That’s an angle. Leo is the beneficiary of a future state that he could successfully navigate through use of technology, but his own beliefs prevent him from capitalizing on the utility of that technology. It’s frustratingly easy to see that movie trapped inside “Mute,” banging on the doors, screaming to be let out, but Jones can’t divest himself of his genre tropes. The movie drowns in them, right down to the “whodunit” framework lifted right out of classic noir. Watching a guy who effortlessly invigorated those tropes almost a decade ago flounder with them today is equally as painful as it is embarrassing. And as for those visual aspirations, it certainly doesn’t help that the awesome production aesthetics of “Blade Runner 2049,” which makes “Mute” look cheap by comparison, appeared only a few short months ago.
Jones does at least one thing right: Rudd’s casting is a stroke of genius. The comedian has played cads and bad boys before or played those archetypes with his prototypical Ruddian charm, but Bill is a particular kind of bad outside of that characteristic range. Jones understands how best to use Rudd’s persona to amplify Bill’s awfulness, and the character, by consequence, is imminently watchable. Maybe “Mute” should have been his movie after all. But that’s not a concern that viewers should have to wrestle with. Jones ought to have done the heavy lifting for them in the writing stage, much less the directing process, and made judicious decisions about both aesthetic and context. “Mute” is in desperate need of a firmer hand. Once upon a time, that hand might have been Jones’. Now he’s invisible in his own pastiche. [C-]