“Naked Singularity” doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be. A courtroom drama? A popcorn heist flick? A sci-fi romp? It doesn’t work for the entirety of its run-time, but somehow, it makes you want to stick with it to see what it does next. Unfortunately, the ending is as bad as its setup.
There are a lot of times when a trio or quartet of great talent joins a project out of the blue that nobody knows is coming until a month before it releases. That project looks good on paper just by the cast alone; but once you sit through it completely—and at times just the first few minutes—you notice it is a disaster. It happened this year with “Infinite” and “Jolt,” where it had talented actors meddled with corrupted narratives and stylistic choices. “Naked Singularity” is another one of those films; a movie where nothing is done properly, yet somehow you stick until the end because…why not?
Casi (John Boyega) is a New York City Public Defender whose idealism is cracking down due to the injustices being delivered daily in the justice system. He wants to make things right for a change, wants to keep people safe. Casi starts getting doubts about his work by sensing a universal collapse around him and his allies. As he gets involved in a new case, he’s pulled into a treacherous and dangerous drug heist hoisted by a former client, Lea (Olivia Cooke), in a way to beat the broken system at its own game once and for all.
The film sets up this collapse by telling us there are ten days until the event happens. We also see him get looser with his decisions and off his game the closer it gets to the date. Filled with angst and nervousness due to the corrupt system, when he is given the chance to do something about it, he reaches for his most trusted ally, his katana. If these couple of sentences didn’t make sense, the entire movie is like that. There is a combination of everything imaginable, so don’t expect it to have an identity of its own because it borrows from everywhere.
What starts as a courtroom drama ends up in a violent drug heist—and in-between them, we get small fractions of what may be a sci-fi element to the film. When things get tough for Casi, the “world” around him starts crumbling down and in some circumstances, we see him floating some inches off the ground. It may be a stylistic concept that Palmer made to showcase the inner angst of a person who is losing faith and wants justice…albeit it ends up with no context, meaning, or reason. It doesn’t have any sense of direction; it wants to do everything, but at the same time, it is nothing else than a tortuous clutter. Nevertheless, being as bad as it is, you still want to see how it ends up.
It has a good cast attached to it: John Boyega, Olivia Cooke, Bill Skarsgård, Tim Blake Nelson, etc. This isn’t the first time this year where we see such a star-studded cast in a quite horrid film…for example, “Chaos Walking” and “The Little Things,” but this one is different. Instead of the actors sticking to their usual shtick, they go and try different things. They try to maneuver new accents, comedic styles, and voices to their characters, and although you see the effort, it doesn’t work. They chew the scenery up and spit it out, yet it isn’t that fun to watch unlike other messes of a film.
Chase Palmer uses his film as a genre and character trial run. It mushes everything imaginable together and it ends up in an evident mess. Unorganized, poorly written, and self-aware, it knows what it is trying to do. While you laugh at the film for having the courage to deliver another star-studded bomb, it doesn’t laugh back. It is hard to take seriously, and the movie doesn’t want you to do so. “Naked Singularity” promotes itself the same way “Infinite” did, by showing a lead character with a long katana. We should now worry the next time we see that calling card during another flick’s promotion.
