a review of 不死之身

#7: He Never Died This is another Netflix queue-burnoff pick. I saw the trailer early last year, and caught Henry Rollins' promotional appearance on The Canon soon after, but by the time it appeared on Netflix, I had other stuff on my plate. As much as I enjoyed the premise as it was explained in the trailer, I found the overall execution a bit lacking in the full-length treatment. The movie really holds on to the full reveal of what (and who) Rollins' "Jack" really is for a good long time (at least an hour into it's 100-min running time), although the trailer and publicity didn't really shy away from it, so I wonder if this was a case of the marketing team having a better sense of what the film needed to be than the people who made it. As it is, the film has a strange lack of urgency about its own plot that, while reflective of an immortal's sense of time, also makes certain moments land in a not very satisfying way. It feels like Jack is sort of sleepwalking through the film with nothing quite connecting the way it should. Plot points are brought up and dropped without any payoff or narrative leverage, which makes me wonder how much was edited out of the film for release. The last twenty minutes are both clunkily written and staged, which gives me the sense that they might have been the very first bits the writer/director wrote for the film, and (if I'm right) that he couldn't bear parting with. The ending is pretentious amateur writers' workshop drivel that plays like self-parody, and should have been totally overhauled in the final product. I don't regret watching this, but I wanted it to be so much better than it was.