Terminal review: Margot Robbie's brainless noir bore is like Suicide Squad on Mogadon
Dir: Vaughn Stein; Starring: Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Dexter Fletcher, Max Irons, Mike Myers. 15 cert, 93 mins.
“Are you familiar with the science of lobotomy?” Margot Robbie asks towards the end of Terminal. Familiar? By that point, you may feel as if you’ve had first-hand experience.
For here is a film that makes the viewer feel as if their brain has been extracted through their nostrils with a drinking straw: an inane and relentlessly boring future noir which casts the Australian Wolf of Wall Street and I, Tonya actress as a femme fatale-type embroiled in a convoluted murder plot.
It features what may be the most incongruous thriller cast ever assembled: Simon Pegg, Dexter Fletcher, Max (son of Jeremy) Irons and Mike Myers, making his first non-cameo live-action appearance since his disastrous 2008 comedy The Love Guru.
The four play, respectively, a former teacher suffering from a fatal respiratory disorder, a pair of laddish hitmen and a swollen-faced, Danny Boy-whistling janitor. All four cross paths with Robbie’s Annie, or possibly Bonnie, at the diner where she works the waitressing night shift.
No-one specifies where they are beyond vague talk of “the Precinct”, but the film is presumably set in a futuristic version of London, judging by the accents (Robbie’s and Myers’ are mostly passable) and public transport logos. Except in practice, it turns out to be the same gritty neon dystopia you’ve seen a thousand times before, down to the obligatory extended scene in a lap-dancing club, where the camera leers at some (futuristic!) strippers for a while on the flimsy pretence that this is the kind of thing that goes on in gritty neon dystopias.
Meanwhile, a shadowy figure called Mr Franklyn lurks behind the scenes. As with every other character here, his aims are incomprehensible, but it involves growling orders down the telephone from behind a bank of flickering surveillance monitors.
This gloomy workstation is one of a number of terminals the film’s title might refer to: other candidates include b) the derelict railway station beside the diner, c) the status of Pegg’s character’s illness, and d) the ambient level of boredom, as the cast plough through scene after scene of sub-Tarantino repartee, cryptic smirking, dire innuendo and Lewis Carroll quotes (this film does for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland what Guy Ritchie’s Revolver did for chess).
The plot itself is so clumsily set out that when the twist ending arrives, it takes Robbie around five minutes of screen time to explain what it is.
First-time writer-director Vaughn Stein seems to have been trying to mix a cocktail of Frank Miller, Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn, but has instead ended up with something resembling Suicide Squad on Mogadon. A film to pour down the sink.
