Originally teased with the droll but less marketable title Colin You Anus, Wheatley’s sporadically amusing semi-farce has a lively rhythm and some fine performances, but the baggy screenplay never delivers the emotional grace notes and knockout revelations it promises.
The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is highly entertaining, full of ridiculously fun early footage of the band and its predecessors, and deeply emotional, with Flea succeeding in making me tear up on multiple occasions. As a film about Hillel Slovak, it’s a bit less successful.
While it’s a little low on scares, Hokum is pacey and involving enough to keep genre fiends watching once it hits streaming, just for production designer Til Frohlich’s creepy hotel set alone, a place that looks untouched by the passing years. But the writer-director smudges the lines separating an ancient evil from a sordid but disappointingly non-supernatural crime.
If its exploration of these ideas is ultimately too incomplete to feel fully satisfying, its performances are strong enough to draw attention throughout.
Despite all the insider’s access, though, in the end the behind-the-scenes episodes offer the illusion of intimacy, rather than anything really illuminating.
If the concept has a way of grabbing one’s attention, however, the execution proves too uneven to leave a lasting impression. Though Good Boy gets by for a while on the strength of its performances and the sheer oddness of its plot, the flimsiness of its characters drains the film of energy long before its 110 minutes are up.
