Joblo
For all of its faults, I still think Monahan’s an interesting filmmaker. Clearly he’s made exactly the kind of movie he set out to, so in that regard Mojave can’t really be called a failure. Yet, it all still feels too pretentious and over-written to really be able to engage with – very similar to how The Gambler was. This is really only worth-seeing for Isaac’s performance and some interesting visuals early-on.
We Got This Covered
Silver linings though, the last bits confirm my initial theories of Mojave‘s opening scenes: despite momentary dips into some existential cleverness, the movie wears its pretentiousness far too much on its sleeve to be able to be taken truly seriously. “Do you know yet which one of us is the bad guy?” asks Jack to Thomas near the movie’s final moments, highlighting, starring, and bolding the movie’s central we all have monsters thesis like it’s throwing a bucket of ice water onto its audience, who asked that question approximately 85 minutes before he did. Jack could have been the Devil, or Thomas’ evil twin, or imaginary, I really have no idea, but nothing creatively emerging from Monahan’s script could have ever added any ultimate satisfactory meaning to this barren wasteland of a movie.
AVClub: By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes, where sneering men say things like “I’d believe Ahab if he had two legs” and “Let’s talk about the desert… Jesus came out here” and call each other “brother” while waving guns around. Stroking his inner Norman Mailer as hard as he can, Monahan spurts out digressions on machismo, lame swipes at the film industry, and unsolicited opinions on the greats. (Byron, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Shaw: If they had a dick and pen, Mojave has something to say about them.) Like all undisciplined exercises in writer ego, Mojave is perversely watchable, though Monahan—screenwriter of The Departed, Kingdom Of Heaven, and the remake of The Gambler, and before that a bad-boy writer for the New York Press—never manages to elevate this nonsensical cat-and-mouse thriller to demented, parodic camp on the level of Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
Empire:
When you go out into the desert, do you find yourself? Or lose yourself? Or something in between? That is one of the themes that Departed writer William Monahan is tackling in his second film as a director, Mojave. We’ve got some exclusive new images from the film to share, and spent time with Monahan on the set of the film to discuss it with him and star Garrett Hedlund.
