Man Down | Little White Lies

Man Down

31 Mar 2017 / Released: 31 Mar 2017

Words by Jack Godwin

Directed by Dito Montiel

Starring Gary Oldman, Kate Mara, and Shia LaBeouf

A man in a green jacket speaking with a woman in a floral dress, standing in an outdoor setting.
A man in a green jacket speaking with a woman in a floral dress, standing in an outdoor setting.
2

Anticipation.

Shia LaBeouf collaborating with director Dito Montiel once more isn’t exactly a huge draw.

2

Enjoyment.

A surprisingly strong performance from LaBeouf and a withholding narrative just about keep things afloat.

1

In Retrospect.

Once the smoke clears and the shock of its twists wears off, Man Down is even worse than it originally appears.

A fired-up Shia LaBeouf tries and fails to sal­vage this mud­dled war drama.

An assem­bly of sol­diers wade through the shal­lows of the sea, approach­ing the forest­ed coast with guns in hand. One laughs as he takes in the scenery. Fuck­ing beau­ti­ful!” he says. Yet the image Man Down presents is of a world drained of colour – the film’s pal­lid hue inspir­ing lethar­gy rather than awe. It could be that Dito Montiel’s ambi­tious psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller is not what it thinks it is.

US marine Gabriel (Shia LaBeouf) is a new recruit into the mil­i­tary along­side his broth­er Devin (Jai Court­ney). Per­spec­tive flits between three main time peri­ods: his war-time depar­ture from his son and wife (Kate Mara); a coun­selling ses­sion about a mys­te­ri­ous trau­mat­ic inci­dent; and his search for his fam­i­ly in an apoc­a­lyp­tic future. None of these sequences are giv­en room to breathe. Instead we cut back and forth at ran­dom, torn from each set­ting before we get a chance to under­stand it.

What’s left is a patch­work of scenes stitched togeth­er from dif­fer­ent movies, the only tan­gi­ble con­nec­tion being that Montiel’s take on bliss­ful home life looks just as washed-out as his decay­ing futuro waste­lands. Man Down’s bloat­ed first act holds back its secrets, leav­ing us to pon­der what the movie is actu­al­ly about right up to its rushed conclusion.

Soldiers in camouflage gear wading through water during a military exercise.

Tonal dis­cord spreads to all of its plot strands and char­ac­ters, right down to a micro­scop­ic lev­el. Courtney’s role as Gabriel’s broth­er is piv­otal, but we know next to noth­ing about him. He spends most of movie blend­ing in with the ashen colour palette, but inex­plic­a­bly gig­gles in delight as his team are rid­dled with bul­lets. Gabriel is the only char­ac­ter who has any tex­ture or con­sis­ten­cy, and that’s only down to LaBeouf’s bizarrely unflinch­ing com­mit­ment to the role, even when the film fails to meet him halfway.

When Man Down tries its hand at being a sim­ple war-time melo­dra­ma, LaBeouf just about car­ries it along. Though these sec­tions rely heav­i­ly on emo­tion­al­ly-charged top­ics like fathers leav­ing their fam­i­lies to go to war, the result is more or less suc­cess­ful. Clint Mansell’s score is sim­i­lar­ly con­ven­tion­al, but it is ele­vat­ed by his exper­tise as a com­pos­er. The impas­sioned med­ley of vio­lins and cel­los adds poignan­cy to moments that would oth­er­wise fall flat.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the times in which these dis­parate ele­ments coa­lesce into some­thing resem­bling emo­tion­al engage­ment are under­cut by the film’s cli­mac­tic dec­la­ra­tion of intent, a reveal that is both non­sen­si­cal and inef­fec­tu­al. The film’s crass attempts to be about some­thing may be well-inten­tioned, but the result is a mes­sage that’s more like­ly to offend than inspire.

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