Bucking Fastard

The 83-year-old Herzog’s wryly funny, touchingly eccentric, and uncompromisingly batshit feature — wait, aren’t they all like that? — will enchant and dismay in likely equivalent proportions.

The result is funny, perplexing and drifty, with an ending that frustrates as much as it pleases: in other words, bucking fizarre.

Those being initiated to Herzog through Bucking Fastard will hopefully embrace the blazing embers of his idiosyncratic signature and dig further into his other glories while his mainstays will hopefully regard this late period weirdness as ducking felightful.

If I cannot bring myself to dismiss Bucking Fastard entirely, it is not out of auteurist reverence, but because the wide-eyed romanticism that permeates it feels genuine, heartfelt, and occasionally infectious.

The Maras remain the best part of the Bucking Fastard, but even they are occasionally overshadowed by a concept that needs a bit more sharpening and refining.

Three movies merged into one, and each one considerably less interesting than the other, Bucking Fastard really feels like a misstep from a master of cinema such as Werner Herzog.

After an interesting first act, Bucking Fastard takes a turn for the worse and steadily crumbles from scene-to-scene until it finally comes to an end. To call Herzog’s movie aimless would be a vast understatement.