Anne Hathaway and Diane Lane anchor a soapy neo-noir that jumps the shark so many times it just might hook you.
There aren’t enough maritime puns in the world to describe the roller coaster that is Matthew McConaughey’s latest showboating project, but even if there were — “Serenity” already used them all. The movie can best be described as a neo-noir soap opera about a man’s quest for a giant tuna, but it’s so over the top it nearly sinks under the weight of delicious insanity. There is a reason that women and gay men own the camp genre; machismo is so ubiquitous that a send-up doesn’t read as satire, at least not this one. The women are the only ones in on the joke, thanks to heavy hitters Anne Hathaway and Diane Lane. Hathaway moves like liquid dynamite, pouring sultriness into her every inch of screen time. She and Lane are the only ones who know how best to handle the ridiculous script: milk it for all it’s worth.
It’s an intentional ridiculousness, cultivated precisely by writer/director Steven Knight. As a screenwriter, Knight earned critical success with “Eastern Promises” (2007), “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), and as the creator of the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” This is his third time directing his own script, most successfully with 2014’s Tom Hardy-starring “Locke.” As the many course corrections of “Serenity” unfold, leading up to one big reveal that explains the movie’s arch tone, it is clear that Knight is entirely in control, though perhaps not in his right mind.
