The Boys in the Boat (2023)

Direction: George Clooney
Country: USA

The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney’s ninth directorial venture - as a filmmaker, he’s known for Good Night and Good Luck (2005) and The Ides of March (2011) - is a sports biographical drama chronicling the triumphant journey of the University of Washington men's rowing team, representing the United States at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. 

The narrative follows Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a working class-student who overcomes familial abandonment to excel as a rower. In supporting roles, Joel Edgerton and Hadley Robinson play the protagonist’s demanding rowing coach and supporting girlfriend, respectively. 

Despite its grandiose sporting achievement, the film suffers from unexceptional performances and overly formal direction, resulting in a pedestrian storytelling experience devoid of brilliance. This disappointing lack of originality, typical of formulaic biographical films, partly stems from Mark L. Smith's uninspired adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name.

While visually polished, the film relies increasingly on melodramatic contrivances rather than exploring character depth, with Clooney sugarcoating Rantz’s predicaments without delivering the necessary emotional impact. The Boys in the Boat offers modest excitement during the competitive sports scenes but falls short in other aspects, running out of steam well before its conclusion. Viewers are left craving more than just a trivial account of the facts.

The Midnight Sky (2020)

Direction: George Clooney
Country: USA

George Clooney stars in and directs The Midnight Sky, a futuristic survival tale incapable of keeping up with the intriguing tone of its preface. Before going from mildly entertaining to disgracefully stagnant in its first two thirds, the film becomes unbearably soppy in the third act. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) was at the wheel of this meager adaptation of the 2016 book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton.

Clearly seeking paths of least resistance in detriment of an imaginative vitality, Clooney devises a two-front odyssey - with the story scuttling back and forth between Earth and space - whose articulation becomes problematic. In truth, its sections operate as a mechanism with a deficit of authenticity, and neither of them, on its own, are particularly fascinating.

The plot centers on a dying scientist, Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney), who remains at a remote observatory located in the Arctic. Everyone else had left the place, except for a little girl named Iris (Caoilinn Springall). He then tries to communicate with the crew of a stranded spaceship, whose mission was to find the next habitable planet for the human race in response to the harmful radiation that’s been hitting the surface of the Earth. 

This slogging post-apocalyptic fiction composed of space inanity and uninspired snow routes crawls right toward disappointment, lacking smart moves and shaping up as a collage of other already existing ideas. A monumental let down.

Suburbicon (2017)

Directed by George Clooney
Country: USA

George Clooney’s film noir “Suburbicon”, a weird crossing between “Double Indemnity” and a Shakespeare’s tragedy, holds a grip until a certain point but ultimately fails to deliver. The first film directed by Clooney in three years had everything to succeed if it wasn’t for its predictability and tackiness in the vain attempt to throw in serial crime episodes, racial injustice, and social satire in the same bag without mixing them well first. Not even the magic touch of the Coen Brothers, who took care of the script alongside Clooney and Grant Heslov, avoided a muddled tale that was only timidly sparked by the great cast.

The film was loosely based on a factual case occurred in Levittown, Pennsylvania, 1957, when a black family moved to a hostile ‘white’ neighborhood. Its central character is an unscrupulous man, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), who schemes to kill his wheelchair-bound wife, having her insidious twin sister, Maggie (Julianne Moore), as an accomplice and future partner. The main motive behind such a repulsive plan is to get a large sum of money from the accidental death insurance. Trouble arrives when the two hired thugs that perpetrated the crime start to feel threatened by Gardner's young son, Nicky (Noah Jupe), who could easily identify. The latter, who has no clue why his father is covering them up, is ultimately rescued by uncle Mitch (Gary Basaraba), the one who loves him like his own child, after being enlisted in a military academy.

In parallel, we follow the hardships of Mrs. Mayers (Karimah Westbrook), an African American woman who moved to Suburbicon with her family in hopes of a decent life. Sadly, she only found intolerance coming from the cruel white inhabitants who don’t waste a chance to humiliate her. This description might rouse some curiosity, but, incredible as it may seem, this segment of the film was even feebler than the murder case, which, at least, and with the help of a greedy insurance agent (Oscar Isaac), slightly stirs some tension. Failing to deliver that dark humor that everybody was expecting, Clooney and his associates were also unable to integrate the two stories in the film. It's excused to say that none of them worked well individually either. 

Having the right performers for each role and created the right looks to fill the background, Clooney nothing could have done in terms of direction or tone to ameliorate the written material, which had already been born defective. Hence, the outcome, not putting him into a shame in terms of filmmaking, is utterly unsatisfactory in terms of the message as well as highly inconsistent in the art of entertaining.