What are you shooting at, Clive?

And sometimes there is a film that is just so fucking stupid, you can only watch it in 15-minute bursts before it gets too much. You keep going, because even the dumbest films can redeem themselves, but it can be hard going.

I didn't expect Anon from 2018 to be one of those films, even though it's part of the endless waterfall of straight to streaming efforts. Writer/director Andrew Niccol had done some smart films in the past that did occasionally veer into the realm of the dumb, but walked that line with some skill.

But Anon trips up over that line, right from the start. The very concept of the film - that everybody has implants that lets them see everything anybody else is getting up to, along with helpful heads-up displays showing all the details of the shit they look at - isn't as smart as it thinks it is. For starters, it's a whole new technology that nobody can turn off, even if it's majorly malfunctioning, and everything you look at comes with grating text and a horrible digital ticking sound that would drive everybody nuts in a week.

So far, so Black Mirror, but then Clive Owen's head gets hacked, and he literally can't trust what he's seeing, and it looks like his hallway is on fire, so he pulls out his gun and starts blazing away. Even though he knows it's fake, and even though it's a fucking fire - what does he think bullets are going to do against it? And thinking somebody might be using the flames to attack them is still no fucking excuse for blind gunfire.

I had to take a break after that. That was too much, man.

And then when I get back to it the next day, Clive goes and gets in a fucking car and tries to drive around a busy future metropolis, even though his eyes are still subject to enforced hallucinations. He doesn't get past the first intersection.

I guess you're meant to admire his hard nature, but this blatant dumbarsery, and the only reason these scenes to be there in the film is so other plot elements can play off later - his poor neighbour who nearly gets shot by him is sacrificed so Clive can be framed for the shooting - which is the dumbest part of all.

I do feel foolish, ripping into a fairly nondescript film from seven years ago that literally nobody else cares about. But it took me days to get through something that should have been an easy watch, because I couldn't take that kind of stupid for too long.