Poor Dee Rees. After coming out of the gate with two great films, Pariah and Mudbound, Rees probably saw The Last Thing He Wanted as another flex of her movie muscles, hoping to capture that epic Mudbound scope again. Magic can’t happen every time unfortunately: The Last Thing He Wanted is a big swing and miss. To make matters worse, the flex with the title will lead to many plays on words at her expense, which she is not deserving of after one bad film.
Based off the Joan Didion novel, The Last Thing He Wanted is actually about a badass female political journalist, Elena McMahon (Anne Hathaway). Set during Ronald Reagan’s reelection in the 1980’s, Elena finds herself covering the campaign instead of going where her heart wants her to go: to Latin America, and the United States’s efforts to create upheaval there. She finds a roundabout way back there when her father (Willem Dafoe) gets sick, and she has to handle whatever “schemes” he’s got set up, including, amazingly, weapons deals in Costa Rica for drugs, which should sound familiar to Iran Contra for anyone keen on history…
The Last Thing He Wanted is too ambitious for a film. We’ve got Nicaragua and Costa Rica’s political upheaval’s. We’ve got Elena’s family drama. We’ve got Treat Morrison (Ben Affleck) trying to keep the US’s LATAM plans under wraps. We’ve got an espionage thriller involving drugs and weapons. And we’ve even got a little romance. That’s a lot of screen time to cover! The movie plays like Rees’s mind during production probably, throwing in scene after scene that are interesting on their own. However, each of those individual scenes have little to nothing in common with the ones before it. The movie feels pieced together like a puzzle missing 20% of the pieces. You’ll be spending a lot of your time trying to figure out who people are and how anything ties together, and the minute you’ve got it, a new player enters the game. I wish Rees had convinced Netflix to give her a little more money to turn this into a mini-series, giving her time for all her ideas and revolving them around a tighter story. Instead, we get a haphazard jumble of a movie that feels pulled in too many directions.
For Dee Rees, I simply say, nice try, forget The Last Thing He Wanted, and move on. For Anne Hathaway, this is now a trend I’m worried about. She has a knack of picking the worst thing people do. Ocean’s Eight. The Hustle. Dark Waters. And the hilariously bad Serenity. Someone please help her! She’s a good actress. It’s the last thing she wanted. BAM! I knew that’s what you were waiting for.