Los Angeles pool cleaner Darren Barrenman is approached by a femme fatale to help uncover corruption in a shady business deal.
Poolman is directed by Chris Pine which is his directorial debut.
I heard about Poolman from the many walkouts and terrible reviews that came from the Toronto Film Festival in 2023. I was very interested to see just how bad this could really be and well…it sure is bad that's for sure. Maybe not as horrendous as expected but still quite baffling.
I actually found the supporting cast to be decently fun, Danny DeVito, John Ortiz and Annette Benning are pretty entertaining in their own ways, plus I do think the movie's bizarre atmosphere that for the most part often misses actually works well for their characters. There's a few line deliveries from the three that are genuinely pretty funny and did get some laughs from me.
Outside of that however Poolman is a very baffling mess, it's clear Chris Pine wanted to make this some sort of Chinatown (1974) and The Big Lebowski (1998) style noir comedy which sounds like an idea that could be fun. However the main issue here is that it's quite dull, the movie very early on is very hard to follow on what exactly is going on and definitely not in away that makes the viewer want to explore the movie. The humor outside of a few moments is just not funny at all, a lot of the jokes are very overwritten or are just cobbled together and have very little build up.
Chris Pine clearly does have love for the noir genre as there are several references to it throughout the movie, but references really don't cut it when your movie is very poorly written and your viewer has long checked out by the time the movie is over. Chris Pine's performance is very unremarkable, there has definitely been far worse, but what a way to make the viewer instantly not care what is going on from the start.
Overall Poolman is a mess, while it's not as bad as expected. That really isn't saying all that much, this might be a "so bad it's hilarious" type of movie for some but definitely not for me.
Poolman is available on all VOD Platforms.
3/10 D-
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