What do Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Colin Farrell, Chris O’Donnell, Antonio Banderas, Alec Baldwin have in common? First, each actor was in a movie opposite a more mature iconic actor such as Al Pacino or Anthony Hopkins. Second, these movies were objectively not excellent. Third, the movie was still subjectively enjoyable. Who doesn’t love The Devil’s Advocate? I used to quote The Edge, “What one man can do, another can do.” Scent of a Woman sparked a ton of comedy skits and impressions. Third, each actor’s performance was still interesting, fun or adequate enough not to harm his career’s future, and being in that movie may have even helped his career.
Well Josh Duhamel got the first two, but the jury is still out on the last one. The universe already has a problem distinguishing Duhamel from Timothy Olyphant, and I think that Olyphant is going to keep snatching that work. Misconduct was a complete miss and disappointing because Hopkins and Pacino can’t salvage the film.
Misconduct starts by using a narrative framing device that I despise unless it is done well, which it wasn’t, the “how we got here” trope where the story opens at a later point in the narrative. Hopkins and his girlfriend who is young enough to be his granddaughter have a fight about the hot topic of the day: a pharmaceutical scandal. Sadly this scene is not even from the end of the story, but the middling middle.
The next scene starts at the beginning, and introduces Duhamel as a hotshot lawyer from a big firm that uses questionable tactics to win. He is married, but he decides to meet with his bat crap crazy, scheming ex-girlfriend, who is Hopkins’ current girlfriend. She gets him to get involved in a case against Hopkins by giving him information that she shouldn’t have, and ethically he shouldn’t use. She claims all this bad stuff about Hopkins’ character that we just don’t see. In the behind the scenes DVD extras, Hopkins says that all of this stuff is true, but he played it as if his character was normal. Huh? No, it just made her seem crazier and like a complete liar, especially when compounded with what she casually does to Duhamel’s career and marriage.
Duhamel goes to his boss, Al Pacino, to bring the business to the firm. Then Misconduct becomes a failed Grisham plot that combines Duhamel’s ailing marriage, crazy ex-girlfriend’s machinations and mind-games, and Duhamel suddenly becoming a suspect on the run. The viewer is supposed to be invested in who committed the murder, but honestly, I wasn’t even sure it was a murder, just a scheme taken too far by accident. The menacing, mysterious Asian man contributed to the murder theory, but he felt like he was supposed to be in a different movie, and they just threw him in because he came to the set by mistake and was so good so why not see if the addition works.
I wish that I could say that Misconduct cleverly fooled me, but I honestly did not care and felt like the whole thing was such contrived nonsense that I was barely paying attention and just wanted it to end. I detest thrillers that have cookie cutter characters implausibly ignore common sense for random murders and intrigue to ensue. I just don’t care. I still haven’t seen Gone Girl, but I suspect that the women are really evil plot is going to get trotted out so often from now on that we will regret it ever existed.
Only Hopkins and Julia Stiles, as his private hostage negotiator, were fun together. Stiles was going for a “I’m the mother**ker” Zero Dark Thirty vibe, which I enjoyed, but she is only in the movie for seconds so that killed my spirit. Misconduct missed an opportunity to have fun when it did not pair Stiles and Hopkins together more. If Misconduct taught me anything or has any value, it taught me that we need to stop pairing younger male actors with titans, but younger female actors with titans with no sexual tension or romantic relationship and give those cheesy movies a shot because that dynamic was more thrilling than anything that Duhamel with Pacino or Hopkins gave me.