MUTE (2018) **

Mute offers us an interesting bit of futurism we haven’t seen before.  We’ve had futuristic movies ask interesting questions in the past.  Duncan Jones’ new one asks:  “What would Amish people look like in the future?”  It’s a cool idea, but sadly, that’s just about where the inspiration ends.

Alexander Skarsgard stars as an Amish guy who works as a bartender in a swanky nightclub.  When his girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh) goes missing, he searches the seedy underbelly of the giant megalopolis to find her.  Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux co-star as back alley doctors who work for gangsters that just might have something to do with her disappearance. 

The most interesting aspect of the movie is having a futuristically impaired man trying to navigate a futuristic backdrop.  Not only that, but since he can’t speak, he must write everything down in order to communicate, making him even more alien in the situation.  I also liked that being Amish in the future means you can still listen to records and have running water (although they are still far behind on the times).

Other than the futuristic Amish hero, there’s very little here to make it memorable.  Mute’s biggest inspiration is of course Blade Runner, but there are also direct visual references to A Clockwork Orange, Walking Tall, and even MASH.  Fans of Jones’ Moon will get a nice little nod to that film too.  While it’s fun spotting how and where Jones takes his inspiration, in the end, like its hero, the movie has very little to say.

The big problem is the fractured narrative.  Half the running time is devoted to Skarsgard’s looking for his girlfriend.  The other half focuses on Paul Rudd trying to get his papers to get out of the city.  The Skarsgard plot is a lot more interesting.  The Rudd scenes aren’t bad, but they are hampered by a subplot involving Theroux’s predilection for young girls.  These scenes not only get in the way of Rudd’s plotline, but they also take away from the immediacy of Skargard’s quest for revenge.  It’s not Rudd and Theroux’s fault.  They’re both great, it’s just that their scenes lack the urgency of the Skarsgard stuff.  By the time he goes on a rampage with a big stick a la Joe Don Baker, it’s lacking in impact since he’s been absent from the plot for so long.

Like Bright, there’s a cool world here with its own set of eccentricities, but there’s not enough meat to flesh out a story worth telling.

Rudd gets the best line of the movie when he tells a Russian gangster:  “I’m AWOL.  You’re an A-Hole!”