Review – Rules Don’t Apply
In 1946, Hollywood mogul and aviation tycoon Howard Hughes got into a horrific plane crash in Beverly Hills, California. The crash demolished three houses, blew up the plane Hughes was in, and nearly killed Hughes, causing him a number of injuries, including a crushed collar bone, multiple cracked ribs, crushed chest with collapsed left lung, shifting his heart to the right side of the chest cavity, and numerous third-degree burns.
This crash pales in comparison to the debacle that is Rules Don’t Apply, Warren Beatty’s first film, starring or directing, in fifteen years and one of the worst films of 2016.
Rules Don’t Apply is a Hollywood farce about an aspiring actress (Lily Collins) and her ambitious young driver (Alden Ehrenreich) as they work for eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (Beatty).
Beatty has been a Hollywood staple for decades, dating back to his breakout performance in the gangster classic, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Over that time, Beatty apparently made a lot of friends, because every single one of them is in this film. This is as star-studded a cast that we’ve seen in 2016. Along with Collins and Ehrenreich, the film also features Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Ed Harris, Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, and slew of others. Yet, even with all these names, they do nothing for the movie. Some of the actors are in one or two scenes, which makes it feel like Beatty was just letting us all know he knows a lot of famous people.
There wasn’t a bad performance in the movie, yet none were great, either. Ehrenreich and Collins make a charming-enough onscreen couple to keep the movie chugging along for the unnecessary two-plus hour long runtime. Broderick has a few good one-liners here and there and it’s nice to see he is still getting work. My biggest gripe in the film is with Beatty as Hughes. Now, maybe it is because I am tainted by my love for The Aviator (2004), Martin Scorsese’s searing Howard Hughes biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and feel DiCaprio really embodied the insanity and brilliance of Hughes better than anyone could. But Beatty’s performance felt more like caricature of Hughes. I never felt any sympathy for the tortured genius and actually found Beatty to be so boring and nothing close to who Howard Hughes really was. For such a larger than life character, Beatty makes him seem small time.
I also couldn’t buy into the romantic-comedy feel for this movie. The love story was fine because of the two leads, but this took away from making Hughes seem more than just a Hollywood douchebag who would buy anything and anyone he could. The movie started collapsing after a bizarre engagement scene, which then turned it from farce into just plain stupidity.
The structuring is all over the place with some of the worst editing of the year. The first hour of the movie is just a series of sporadic cuts to scenes that don’t have any purpose to the story, but are just there to be there. The movie also runs far too long. As I said above, it is over two hours long, which isn’t really long at all, but it just dragged on and on. I checked my watch at least six times in forty minutes, it went that slow. We also get terrible time jumps. Rarely was it established what year we were in or how much time had passed.
At the end of the day, Rules Don’t Apply is the definition of a vanity piece. Warren Beatty brought in all of his friends to make a movie that he wrote, directed, produced, and starred about a subject he wanted to make. This movie is nothing but Warren Beatty trying to be relevant again, and it fails miserably. If this is the path you’re going, Mr. Beatty, it is probably best you stay retired.
MY RATING – 1/4
Did you see Rules Don’t Apply? What did you think? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook and YouTube by searching Kevflix.