What makes one vanity project more vainglorious than the next? How can we judge the motivations of the filmmaker and say whether their want to make any movie is merited? Chris Pine loves movies. He’s making a movie because he loves them and it reflects many of the ones he loves.
Structurally Chris Pine’s Poolman is Inherent Vice (2014), content-wise it’s a sun-blanched modernization of Chinatown (1974), and the central character influence is crystal clear — The Dude, from The Big Lebowski (1988). It’s these movies and a dozen other movies about Los Angeles, it’s all of them and none of them at all — a broad overgeneralization of what a movie can be and an empty abyss of vacuous nothingness. The movie is a contradiction circling the pool drain, both made out of warmth and with so little identifiable feeling that you cannot locate the humanity in it.
The cast reads well but nobody is good in the movie. The cast includes Chris Pine, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, Clancy Brown, Ray Wise, and some other people who owe Pine a favor. That listing sounds like a great movie! If there were really a movie here, it would be one, not that anyone needs to feel too dejected but they might all wonder why they got involved.
The movie does not look bad. It captures Los Angeles as it’s been filmed before. It’s just that the way the movie is lensed by Matthew Jensen is almost a redundancy because nothing meaningful happens in the frame. Los Angeles, as they say, always plays itself, and it does not have much choice in the matter.
What is strikingly bad about the movie is that it is simply an incoherent arrangement of scenes, characters, weightless plot mechanics, and references with no value statement there to meet them. Ideas about Los Angeles are said aloud but they do not mean anything more than to locate the film. And they keep coming. Again and again, Chris Pine’s love affair with Los Angeles is captured, but it directs the audience toward nothing at all, which is sort of how everything in the movie goes, just some ideas in front of a camera, student-film like, but featuring veritable actors who could be doing something.
Especially Chris Pine. He’s the internet’s favorite Chris and his charisma is the reason why. Didn’t you see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)? If you have, you may stop and ponder if he’s the perfect leading man for blockbuster fare and if you haven’t you should absolutely go watch that instead of Poolman.
Poolman is nothing. It’s a film reel unspooling with sun drenched dreams of California and nothing else. It’s all the movies ever made and it’s not even substantively a complete movie in itself. Should we, then, chide Chris Pine for his evident passion and equally evident lack of direction? Because he’s what, a celebrity? Because his Chinatown redux is not Jack Nicholson making The Two Jakes (1990) and what, is he less viable as a director of movies than a really bad guy who made a great movie like Polanski and Chinatown? At worse, we ought to recoil at the projects being helmed by actors so soon after a strike, these products of false-legitimacy, these errant nothings replacing the somethings we might be watching if the writers hadn’t struck. The industry is the target, not Chris Pine, who even in abject failure is just so easy to like.