Infinite is an appropriate title. For one, it goes off in all directions. It seems to take bits and pieces of far better movies and cobbles them together. And at about an hour and 45 minutes with credits, this movie seems a lot longer in length.
A lot of critics have been comparing it to The Matrix, but it seems to remind me of movies such as Highlander and Dead Again, that great thriller by Kenneth Branagh about a woman with amnesia and how it may or may not tie with a decades-old murder.
That being said. Save yourself two hours and each either Highlander, Dead Again, or even The Matrix. Skip this movie entirely.
In January of 2020, Mark Wahlberg appeared in my native town of Calhoun, Ga., where he was appearing at a Wal-Mart for some program. Making an appearance at a Wal-Mart in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district should be a sign of just how far down Wahlberg’s career has headed since the early 1990s.
Granted, Donnie Wahlberg made those Saw movies but he also surprised the hell out of us with his crucial role in The Sixth Sense.
And Mark has proven himself to be a great actor, too. He was great in Boogie Nights, a role he know regrets, even though he has a list of movies that are worse, and his Oscar nominated-role in The Departed alongside veteran actors Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen and Hollywood heavyweights Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio was an achievement everyone would’ve laughed at back during his pants-dropping days. Marky Mark in a Martin Scorsese movie? Sure, Marty likes to cast musicians and singers, but no one would’ve believed it 30 years ago.
And as Mark as recently turned 50, he has branched out with comedy, the Ted movies, and The Other Guys, mocking his tough-guy image with his scowl. And behind that scowl is a soft guy who can make movies like Daddy’s Home and Instant Family and make us see he’s just a regular joe from Boston.
Unfortunately, Infinite, like last year’s Spenser Confidential, is another movie in Wahlberg’s vanity projects. Spenser opened with Mark in the titular role beating up his Boston police captain after suspecting him of spousal abuse. Infinite has not one, but two scenes, early on in which his character, Evan McCauley, gets violent or talks about getting violent with men who inappropriately touch or harass/mistreat women.
There’s a scene of a job interview that is totally extraneous in which he tells a restaurant’s owner about an incident in which he injured a man who inappropriately touched a waitress. This scene is nothing more than an attempt for Mark to assert himself as a tough guy who respects women.
And in the next scene he’s presenting a katana he made to a drug lord who gets mad when his lady friend keeps looking at Evan. While this scene is relevant, the exposition at the restaurant could’ve been mentioned because Evan finds himself in a police interrogation room that doesn’t look like any police interrogation room I’ve ever seen.
And that’s where Chiwetal Ejiofor walks in and the rest of the movie makes no more sense. Even though he’s 50 in real life, Mark is supposed to be 35 in the movie.
I failed to mention there’s a car chase scene that begins the movie that’s supposed to be set in Mexico City in 1985 even though there’s not much information. I had to go to Wikipedia for a basic summary because very little is reveled here about the movie’s plot. And this isn’t one of those movies that makes you want to re-watch it for things you might have missed.
Infinite bounces around so much and has so many things going on, it doesn’t make sense. Apparently, Evan is really Heinrich Treadway, who was in that car chase that began the movie. And Heinrich has been around for centuries, which is why he is able to make katanas, but trying to get jobs working at restaurants because he thinks he’s a schizophrenic.
You see Ejiofor plays the bad guy Bathurst, who like Thanos in the MCU, wants to destroy the world or the population, I don’t know.
There’s a lot I don’t understand about this movie. And you probably won’t understand it either. It’s probably a good thing the Covid-19 pandemic kept this from its 2020 release so Paramount could easily burn it off on their Paramount+ streaming service. Spenser was released in 2020 on Netflix which has become a hub of movies that are terrible.
Earlier this year, Paramount released Without Remorse on Amazon Prime. While A Quiet Place II is making them some good money at the box office and they still have that long-awaited Top Gun sequel and Mission: Impossible movie to look forward to, the studio can probably shrug off these movies.
Speaking of the MCU, Paramount, at one time, was distributing the movies, before things went over to Disney. This was a good move for both studios and I might do a blog about this later, but Paramount may one day regret that decision if it continues to make movies like this.
Zane Says 