The Voices
There’s an unwritten rule that has been present throughout filmmaking history: when making a movie in which an insane Ryan Reynolds talks to a sour Scottish-accented cat that encourages him to kill people and a comparatively angelic dog that suggests he do the opposite, go all the way or go away. Either fully commit to the horror-comedy trappings of the premise at hand, or, if feeling particularly brave, forge a drama regarding the mental health issue of hearing and being influenced by disembodied voices. Merging the two tones is a trick few people can pull off. With the disastrous The Voices, graphic-novelist-turned-director Marjane Satrapi demonstrates she is not one of those people.
If never very good, The Voices is admittedly not terrible for its first twenty-five minutes or so, until Reynolds’ Jerry snaps and butchers one unlucky colleague and the strict comedy tone is abandoned for an unsuccessful mishmash. Its grisly parts lack any actual suspense, the various digressions towards serious pathos are embarrassing, and the parts it plays for tongue-in-cheek irony lack any actual wit.
The very construction of the film, too, feels off throughout, with frequently stilted scene transitions and an unwise choice to play certain narrative cards far too early, considering some of the pathos beats Satrapi seems to want to hit; the festering, gruesome realities of Jerry’s apartment when he’s back on his prescribed medication should be a shocking reveal at the end, not scattered throughout and dismissed within a minute to get back to Gemma Arterton’s chirpy talking head in a fridge.
The Voices wants it all ways at once (even ending with an insufferable ‘wacky’ musical number for the closing credits), but Satrapi makes none of those ways at all rewarding. It’s the kind of tedious misfire that provokes active regret regarding the time wasted watching it.