The Last Thing He Want­ed – first look review

It’s always a shame when a film you’ve been excit­ed about watch­ing turns out to be a dis­ap­point­ment. From the sec­ond it was announced, Dee Rees’ adap­ta­tion of Joan Didion’s nov­el ​‘The Last Thing He Want­ed’ sound­ed like it could be major, with Anne Hath­away, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez and Willem Dafoe all signed on and Rees her­self fresh off direct­ing the excel­lent Mud­bound. Sad­ly, this half-baked polit­i­cal thriller is far less than the sum of its parts.

As in Didion’s nov­el, the film con­cerns Ele­na McMa­hon (Hath­away), a hot­shot reporter who quits her job fol­low­ing the ​’84 Reagan/​Bush cam­paign trail when her father Richard (Dafoe) falls ill. While attempt­ing to take care of some unfin­ished busi­ness for him, she inad­ver­tent­ly becomes embroiled in the very sto­ry she had once tried to crack, involv­ing US gov­ern­ment-backed arms deal­ing in Cen­tral America.

Elena’s pres­ence brings her to the atten­tion of Treat Mor­ri­son (Affleck), a high-rank­ing gov­ern­ment offi­cial who soon begins inves­ti­gat­ing McMahon’s rea­sons for being in Cos­ta Rica, while her col­league Alma (Perez) back in Wash­ing­ton awaits news of the situation.

It did feel a lit­tle strange that The Last Thing He Want­ed was select­ed for a Sun­dance pre­mière rather than debut­ing in a ritzy awards sea­son spot, but hav­ing now seen the end prod­uct, it’s easy to see why – the con­vo­lut­ed plot, strained dia­logue and phoned-in per­for­mances would have nev­er passed muster on the Oscars trail.

Adapt­ing Did­ion is no easy task, but Rees and Mar­co Vil­lalo­bos’ screen­play strips her prose of all poet­ry, turn­ing her sto­ry into some­thing cold and func­tion­al. It’s as dif­fi­cult to be invest­ed in McMahon’s rela­tion­ship with her father as it is her sud­den, baf­fling romance with Mor­ri­son, let alone fol­low the com­plex plot, which jumps around North and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, mut­ter­ing about arms deal­ers and con­tras with­out actu­al­ly say­ing why any of this is important.

Add to this shod­dy sound mix­ing, an inva­sive score and one extreme­ly bad VFX shot towards the end, and The Last Thing He Want­ed stacks up as the biggest dis­ap­point­ment of Sun­dance 2020.