Tommy receives an invitation to win $1 million by playing a game where he must outwit hunters attempting to kill him. He realises the hunters can only attack him when he's alone, but none of his friends and family believe the game is real.
Lots of streaming films came out this week, Netflix released Lift, Amazon Prime Video released Role Play, Shudder released Destroy All Neighbors and Hulu released Self Reliance. Luckily Self Reliance is a lot better than Lift and Role Play.
For one thing Self Reliance is actually trying to say something, even if that something and its ideas don't fully come together in the end due to a very rushed and unfocused ending. The performances are actually quite solid Jake Johnson who is also the director, writer and one of the producers of the movie gives a charming performance that's actually quite funny at times. Anna Kendrick is also charming and while not one of her absolute best performances she does really make it work, her chemistry with Johnson is very solid leading to some strong moments where the two bounce off of each other quite well.
As a director Jake Johnson shows a lot of promise here, there's some genuinely funny moments that uses the movie's main premise quite well and the characters actually do feel like a group of friends at times. The movie on the surface has a thrilling sounding premise but the movie's main focus is the humor which works most of the time, I definitely think if some scenes were more thrilling they would work far better than the end result.
Unfortunately Self Reliance is held back from the final moments of the movie, it's a very weak ending that honestly feels rushed, the movie builds itself to be a lot more than it really is in certain scenes only to end on a whimper of ending. It's unfortunate because this was very close from being something really solid, everything else that came before the ending was genuinely fun and while not anything to write home about still manages to keep the viewer's attention.
Overall Self Reliance isn't a bad movie it's just one that could have been so much better with more time in the oven.
Self Reliance is available on Hulu
5/10 C
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