Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich movie a wreck at Sundance

To look at “Opus,” the muddled semisatire starring Ayo Edebiri and John Malkovich that premiered on the Sundance Movie Competition, is to expertise a film shortly go from promising to punishing.

Authoring the wreck is writer-director Mark Anthony Inexperienced, who’s screwed up a often ironclad story: Unsuspecting pawns get invited by an eccentric wealthy man on an expensive getaway solely to be caught in its darkish underbelly. House run, proper?

In spite of everything, that was the set-up for Zoe Kravitz’s infinitely higher “Blink Twice” final yr and Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 2023. Heck, it’s the tough plot of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

Inexperienced’s lesser, indulgent, tiresome spin is about across the music trade and the obsessive fandom it conjures up. What with Swifties and Little Monsters, his imaginative and prescient is topical in that it’s each related and fully surface-level. 

But firstly, “Opus” seems that it may possibly, presumably be enjoyable.

Glam-rocker Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich) hasn’t launched a brand new album or been seen publicly in 30 years when his agent (Tony Hale) broadcasts a report is lastly on the way in which. The world is abuzz, and stunt-loving Moretti invitations a choose few journos to jet to his Utah property and be the primary to hearken to the hotly anticipated tracks.

This movie ought to be reliably filling as pizza for dinner. However the deliveryman is an hour late and has dropped the field.

Aboard the non-public airplane and four-hour constitution bus is Ariel (Edebiri), a pushed New York author who desires to make her title with severe reporting. Edebiri does her dry, cocked-eyebrow shtick, and does it properly.

Additionally alongside for the trip is her journal editor Stan (Murray Bartlett), an enormous talker who’s threatened by Ariel’s expertise and has self-centeredly assigned himself to put in writing the story as a substitute. Equally vainglorious is Clara (Juliette Lewis), a tart-tongued TV character. 

The remainder are superfluous. Invoice (Mark Sivertsen) has a podcast; Emily (Stephanie Suganami) is a social media influencer; Bianca (Melissa Chambers) stalks celebs as a photographer; and Bingo was his name-o.

Aside from Ariel, all of those characters are nursery-rhyme-bland. And I don’t imply within the sense that they lack textured interior lives. The dullards barely have fundamental traits, so unmemorable all of them are.

The group arrives to find a pop-up city with smiley drones carrying dishevelled, clay-colored garments — clearly a cult.  

And who higher to guide a brain-washed flock of followers than Malkovich, whose Moretti is stupidly nicknamed “The Wizard of Wiggle.” The actor’s peculiar overenunciation and theatrical expressiveness are all the time entertaining and he convincingly sings just a few unique songs. Moretti’s main hit is known as “Dina Simone.” Nonetheless, his and Edebiri’s expertise are wasted by a movie that in the end falls aside.

Discomfort and rigidity don’t construct as we’d count on them to in a thriller. Aside from Ariel, the superfans blithely ignore all of the troubling occurrences taking place throughout them, and the movie abruptly ends when their fame-blind naivety results in a predictable groaner of a finale.  

Moretti’s causes for asking every particular person to return, that are revealed in the previous couple of minutes, are flimsy. An enormous “That’s it?!” After which Inexperienced rushes in his theses about self-interest — an artist’s ego, a fan’s want for objective, a tell-all writer’s want to promote books — that hit as laborious as a Wiffle ball. 

Regardless of boasting the terrific star of “The Bear,” “Opus” is a canine.