Maxxxine (2024)

Watched 10/18/24 (MAX)

If X was a ‘70s Tobe Hooper grindhouse homage and Pearl was “A24or” meeting the technicolor of classic Hollywood, then Maxxxine is dimestore ‘80s De Palma with an emphasis on cheapness. There isn’t a sliver of authenticity to be found in the trilogy capper which is odd as the first two entries were quite convincing in their transportation. Director Ti West’s latest is saddled with terribly unsubtle dialogue, an undecided tone, a complete lack of anything resembling a good setpiece, and some brutally generic nostalgia porn. It makes no attempt to actually be the sexy or violent romp it advertises itself as, instead feeling much more like a bullshit studio job then an A24 creativity well. A small studio like A24, known for writer/director freedom, should be putting out, and usually does put out, movies that push the boundaries. Brian De Palma certainly pushed the limits of bad taste back in the ‘80s, and Maxxxine’s sad attempt to replicate that excess is simply a failure.

Maxxxine Minx of the series’ first entry, X, has moved to 1980s Hollywood this time around, and she’s a fucking asshole. She tells everyone how much of a star she is, and she’s not actually that good. Or maybe she is, but we don’t see it. It’s mostly a Ti West fumble, here. Whereas something else about Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, truly spent a large amount of time with stars Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt to showcase their acting, Maxxxine gives us literally 5 minutes or less of its titular character’s acting and then she won’t shut up about it the rest of the movie. This movie tells, it does not show. And it certainly doesn’t do any of the cool inside-baseball moviemaking tricks that movies about making movies need to do to make them successful (again, watch Babylon instead).

Maxxxine is being hunted in Hollywood by an annoying private dick played by a strongly accented but very flat Kevin Bacon, a mystery killer who turns out to be the silliest, stupidest twist of the movie, and various porn/movie producers, directors, etc. We hear so much about the porn industry in this movie, but the director has zero interest in showing any of that. Again, telling not showing, and at the least this could have showed some more skin to make it worth the price of admission. Or some better, more drawn-out, more crafty kills, perhaps? Instead, we are left with a pretty cold bucket of walking and talking. And the talking is……not good.

The dialogue is the biggest point of pain in a movie that is mostly just boring and lacking. The dialogue is in your face and is terrible. Maxxxine herself delivers most of it, and it feels as if it were written by a middle-schooler. But Mia Goth doesn’t seem to understand that. She delivers these unsubtle, awful lines with such belief that it’s almost funny. After her blowhard monolog at the end of Pearl, I guess she thinks she can do no wrong. However, I would argue that putting the subtext in the text each and every time characters open their mouths is very wrong. It is what has been plaguing the Star Wars universe for the last few years and I don’t understand why none of these projects won’t just hire better writing staff. It’s mind-blowing how unconscious of their silliness these writers are. And even more mind-blowing that people like Ti West can shoot this stuff and not want to rewrite it after hearing how dumb it sounds.

Anyways, not just Mia Goth says this stuff. The whole cast is saddled with weird, in-your-face lines, and none of them make it work. The cast includes Giancarlo Esposito, Elizabeth Debicki, Lily Collins, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, and, crucially, Simon Prast. Sounds fun, right? Wrong. Esposito is the best of the bunch and has one fun scene with a car crusher, but he doesn’t have much else to work with. Debicki is saddled with the next worst dialogue besides Goth—her aspirations as a Hollywood director are painfully spelled out. Collins is in four minutes of the movie so who knows if she is good or not. Monaghan and Cannavale are saddled with the world’s worst set pieces and some very inauthentic police work. They feel out of a completely different movie. And Simon Prast sucks. He feels like he’s acting in Tommy Wiseau’s The Room if it were a shitty De Palma rip.

Maxxxine’s setup craft is another fatality, with no camera tricks or setpieces making even the slightest of impacts. No kill scene or action scene lasts for more than a minute or two, draining them of all suspense. With the exception of some testicles exploding (good funny bit), this movie feels lazy. A final shootout is the cherry on top, with tough lines from Cannavale and Monaghan and an even tougher lack of onscreen kills/creativity. Anyone shot in this scene just gets shot, the environment is not used in a single inventive way, and you can tell they just wanted to find a way to wrap everything up. And certain characters’ deaths in this scene are unintentionally hilarious. Just weird with no handle at all on tone—this movie really has no idea what it wants to be sometimes, I swear. And when it does know what it wants to be, it doesn’t put in any of the legwork to pay decent homage to the greats it imitates.

Maxxxine either pulls punches or never throws them in the first place throughout it’s runtime. It’s one of the most boring, lifeless movies of the year and a disappointment for me as a fan of the previous entries in Ti West’s A24 trilogy. Nothing happens in this movie!! They just walk around spouting bad lines. I really hope this one doesn’t ruin X for me, but I already thought Pearl was trying a bit too hard so I should probably avoid a rewatch there and just stick with X. Forget about Maxxxine as soon as possible or, better, just don’t watch it. Seek out some De Palma flicks instead.

2/10