Control
The pariah of Hollywood, Kevin Spacey, mounts his comeback in this woeful British thriller.
It’s difficult to delve into Control without talking about the huge elephant in the room. The thriller, as is so evident on the poster and in the marketing, stars Kevin Spacey - or, at least, his voice. Director Gene Fallaize mounts a story where Spacey can easily jump in an audio booth anywhere in the world, and suddenly get top billing on this film. And while that is a controversial decision (one that had his British premiere canceled by the cinema when they found out who starred), it’s also one Fallaize has obviously made with all of the factors in mind; no matter how canceled Spacey is in America, Fallaize is betting the Europeans will be more enticed by that ‘Academy Award Winner’ moniker in the trailer, irrespective of whose name is under it.
Ultimately, it’s a decision that does make watching Control quite - for want of a better word - icky. You can never really dive into the film because of it. But perhaps the worst part of this creative decision-making process by Fallaize is the rest of the movie, because it is so bad that the presence of Spacey starts to feel like a bit of a godsend.
We’re thrust into a story that follows the British Home Secretary Stella Simmons (Lauren Metcalfe), as she takes the Prime Minister’s daughter home from an art show. Her and the Prime Minister are having an affair, but during the hilariously low rent art gallery speech from the sitting Prime Minister, his daughter gets tired. Stella offers to take her home in her fancy auto-driving car; only for that car to be hacked by a mysterious Voice (Kevin Spacey), forcing her on a rampage through London.
Let’s call a spade a spade here; Control is bad. Visually, the cinematography is unimaginative and cheap. The performances are terrible, only eclipsed in abject dismay by the quality of the script. The sets are woeful - the Art Gallery sequence in particular looks like it was shot in the back room of an elementary school. That’s not to even touch on the editing, which is hamfisted at best. Whether it’s the laugh-out-loud bad Prime Minister speech cutting to nodding audience members, or the knee-slapping cutting of Stella running over a group of pub drunkards on the street, the inadvertent humor in Control is popping.
It is difficult to truly examine the performances here, because to recollect them is almost a physical pain. But Metcalfe’s line delivery is truly unbelievable. It’s a performance for the ages, and makes you watch the film with a constant air of feeling sorry for everyone involved. Spacey, by comparison, shows with the smallest amount of effort possible why he is Academy Award Winner Kevin Spacey, but still this is phoning it in literally and figuratively for the man now persona-non-grata. The VFX is also a complete shitshow, the windows of the car constantly not appropriate for the time of day, location, or just not seeming real.
Outside of all of that, Control does pose one or two interesting questions. Chief among them is the automatic car. This movie holds a lot of the same elements as a movie like Locke, and outside of the marked, cavernous gap in production quality, acting talent, script writing capability and general good sense, what could make these two pieces feel so disparate? One thing is, I believe, the autonomous nature of the vehicle. Metcalfe is never actually driving the car - it’s always self-driving. This leaves her just sort of sitting there, and it makes it such a meek, ineffectual and stagnant position. You can see how challenging it must be for an actor to build up the required intensity to deliver a compelling performance, when they have nothing to work with. If anything, Control is an insight to the challenges of green screen acting - remarkable, given she isn’t being shot necessarily on a green screen.
Ultimately, it’s tough to bash a movie from an independent team, because making a movie is so incredibly challenging. Fallaize and his team should, normally, be congratulated just for getting the film complete, flaws and all. But that moral barrier seems to drop a little when you wilfully enlist and champion Kevin Spacey as the lead in your film in this day and age. It feels a bit cynical, a little commercial, and a little like the art doesn’t matter to Fallaize. There are thousands of budding young British filmmakers who could have made compelling content with the funds used for this sloppy, muddled, unwatchable mess, and they won’t get the chance to do so because this got made. And it got made because Fallaize was willing to enlist Spacey, despite every moral fibre telling him that was probably a bad idea.
You can do a lot with a small budget. Frankly, this movie could have done a lot more with its small budget. But it doesn’t. Not only is it a waste, it’s a bit of a slap in the face to other low budget filmmakers who could have done something better than this, had they been given the chance - without having to sell their soul like Fallaize has to service the attempted comeback of a man relegated to the cold.
