Lou Review

"Lou," Netflix's latest would-be afternoon-waster is a five dollar script with a million dollar cast, the alluring offer of turning Allison Janney into an action star ala Liam Neeson too good to pass up. But it leaves nothing to the imagination, every plot-point overexplained so that all you have are gorgeous visuals, solid performances and a hollow core.

Janney stars as the titular Lou, introduced to us holding a rifle in her mouth, clearly a model citizen. But a knock at her door during a storm by her renter Hannah (Jurnee Smollett), panicked as her daughter Vee  (Ridley Bateman) is kidnapped by her supposedly deceased dad Phillip (Logan Marshall-Green). Turns out, he faked his death because plot, and snatches his kin because, also, plot. The narrative gets bogged down in needless government intrigue involving blackmail, the CIA, war, all the stuff that should serve as a mere backdrop for the action. But there is hardly any action here, though the little we do get is exciting and well-staged, so you might be thinking this is a more adventure, suspense sorta deal? Sorry folks, the moments when someone isn't talking, nothing is happening.

It's not like the story is exactly anything special either, a tale so old it has arthritis. Lou and Hannah set out to find little Vee, but outside of a broken bridge and some irregular terrain, the wilderness is hardly wild. There's nary a moment where the cards feel stacked against them, outside of you know, trying to find the girl, so we watch many moments of our small cast just walking and exchanging dialogue that probably sounds good in commercials. There's a missed opportunity here, because mother nature can be a dangerous beast, but according to the film here, only bad people are any threat.

Admittedly, the rain-soaked scenery of the Washington woods are beautiful and create a sense of foreboding unknown, but everything is just too dark to really get a sense of scale. Whether because of budgetary reasons or a cinematic decision, so much of the runtime takes place in the shadows, my poor old flat screen TV struggling to show anything outside of muddled blackness.

The absence of sun ends up as something of a logical issue as well, with night becoming day only to become night again, and since this is a movie, the characters seldom need to sleep with consistency. Thus we never can fully realize what time of day anything is going on in, robbing us from knowing exactly how long the trek is and exactly how tired everyone is, or rather should be. Look I get it, these are extraordinary people in an extraordinary situation, but if you're going to pretend to show the characters as "real" by having them get hurt, then you also need to show them rest outside of when the script feels the need to spoon-feed the audience some arbitrary twist.