Poolman (2024, dir. Chris Pine)

by Jack Martin | Jun 27, 2024

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 100 mins

UK Distributor: Prime Video

UK Release Date: 28 June 2024

WHO’S IN POOLMAN?

Chris Pine, Annette Bening, DeWanda Wise, Stephen Tobolowsky, Clancy Brown, John Ortiz, Ray Wise, Juliet Mills, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Danny DeVito

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Chris Pine (director, writer, producer), Ian Gotler (writer), Patty Jenkins and Stacey Sher (producers), Andrew Bird (composer), Matthew Jensen (cinematographer), Stacey Schroeder (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A free-spirited pool cleaner (Pine) uncovers a major conspiracy…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON POOLMAN?

At last year’s Toronto Film Festival, held during the SAG-AFTRA strikes that prevented any on-screen talent from attending the big galas, Chris Pine’s directorial debut Poolman immediately made waves for all of the wrong reasons. Reports of mass walkouts during its initial screening stung just slightly less than the abysmal reviews it received from critics, who were quick to label it one of the worst festival debuts in modern history, possibly of all time. At least the strikes ensured that Pine couldn’t attend and witness the criticism first-hand, though there’s no doubt that he caught wind of all that negative feedback anyway, for a film that he clearly poured a lot of his heart and soul into.

But as much as I’d like to stand up for Pine for following his dream and making the film he wanted to put out there, Poolman really is as bad as critics have made it out to be. Like, staggeringly bad. The kind that only comes around once in a blue moon, when someone with a fair amount of popularity and power decides they have what it takes to make something they think is utterly profound but ends up being the most baffling series of creative decisions since Tommy Wiseau cast himself as an all-American protagonist in The Room.

A film like The Room, though, is one that you can easily laugh at for its many, many mistakes. Poolman, on the other hand, does not have the luxury of being the funny type of bad; it’s just altogether bad, an astounding misfire that plenty of talented people got roped into and then given absolutely nothing to work with, for an entertainment-free 100 minutes.

Pine (who co-wrote the script with Ian Gotler) also stars as the particularly named Darren Barrenman, an absent-minded guy who lives in a small caravan right next to a motel pool – the only pool in Los Angeles, apparently – which he regularly cleans and does some of that cross-legged underwater meditating that supposed deep souls do in these types of films. In his spare time, he’s also some kind of activist, regularly writing letters to Erin Brockovich like she’s his pen-pal, and collaborating with local documentary filmmaker Jack (Danny DeVito) and his therapist Diane (Annette Bening) on a movie charting his efforts to convince local councilman Stephen Toronkowski (Stephen Tobolowsky) about setting up a new bus route… or something. Honestly, it’s hard to get a true gage on what this guy is actually campaigning for, or even why he’s dedicating his unfulfilling life to something that is quite possibly far more unfulfilling.

Soon, Darren is visited by a woman named June (DeWanda Wise), who gives him information that Toronkowski is corrupt, and that only he can expose the truth about him. However, as Darren and his friends – and, occasionally, his girlfriend Susan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and pining buddy Wayne (John Ortiz) – investigate the allegations, he soon uncovers a much larger conspiracy at play. One that, incidentally, rings more than a few Chinatown-shaped bells.

Chinatown is a film that Pine blatantly has an enormous infatuation with, and here attempts to pay homage toward both that movie and the shaggy-dog wackiness of The Big Lebowski. However, Pine’s film reaches a point where the pretence of homage gives way to full-on copying, with the plot being a near-exact replica of Roman Polanski’s film noir classic, while the humour is aiming for the same brand of absurdist humour that the Coen Brothers infused in their own comedy phenomenon. Furthermore, it commits the ultimate sin of directly referencing and even showing clips from one of those far better movies early on, in case you needed to be reminded that you could indeed be watching anything else other than Poolman.

Someone like Pine, who has starred in his fair share of blatant rehashes or rip-offs of other movies during his career, shouldn’t need to be reminded that by constantly calling attention to classic movies during the one you’re meant to be watching, you’re almost always going to have the audience thinking about those films instead, especially when your movie is of a significantly lesser quality. Yet, Pine is undeterred in his mission to recall genuine classics like Chinatown and The Big Lebowski rather than inject any of that spirit into his own original ideas and executions.

Pine is also a terrible director, for he fails to rein in any of his actors as they drone on and on during lengthy monologues, none of which offer even an iota of information about the characters delivering them, and often don’t have anything to do with the main plot itself (or maybe they did; the film is surprisingly complicated in its narrative that it’s easy to drop in and out of these windless conversations). It is 100 minutes of very talented actors like Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Twin Peaks veteran Ray Wise being left to ramble in front of the camera, because their director has no idea how to tell them that they need to dial down their long-winded and ultimately unfunny speeches.

Either that, or Pine is too wrapped up in presenting himself as the noble gold-hearted hero who just wants to be loved, in typical actor-turned-first-time-filmmaker behaviour that always puts their ego over telling a coherent story with characters you want to follow along on this crazy journey. The vanity on display is so apparent that a major character’s introduction in the film is dominated almost entirely by Pine’s shirtless bearded body, with said character initially shown only through the reflection of a window. This is something you’d usually see in a Hollywood satire, where an egotistical actor would make their own movie and then cast themselves as the infallible protagonist, except that this is an actual movie that was made for our reluctant consumption.

Though it is never intentionally funny, you do still want to laugh at Poolman for its overall ineptitude, but the fact is that it’s far too boring to even be classed as so-bad-it’s-good entertainment. With its many meandering dialogue scenes and slow-paced plotting – which is predictable to all except those who aren’t aware that Chinatown also exists – as well as student-film levels of abstract symbolism, your attention is always limited, even when the film becomes mildly interesting for a brief moment (which, in this case, is a later scene involving Stephen Tobolowsky, a character actor who like his many co-stars deserves better material than this) before plunging itself right back into fruitless mundanity. It’s just too dull to appreciate, even on an ironic level, because Pine never elevates the material with the type of over-the-top comedy that it perhaps needs in order to at least be memorable.

Instead, Poolman is a shockingly bad misfire that should, quite frankly, be left to drown.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Poolman is a shockingly bad directing debut for star and co-writer Chris Pine, who blatantly rips off classic films like Chinatown and The Big Lebowski without any of their true spark, while failing to rein in his rambling actors or his own ego that is put front and centre of this dull and unentertaining vanity project that can’t even be enjoyed in an ironic sense.