“Easy’s Waltz,” Nic Pizzolatto’s feature directorial debut, is the type of baffling misfire that leaves you questioning the judgment and talent of all involved. Because nothing, not the writing, direction, or acting, even remotely works.
It’s a pressure-sealed disaster of a movie where nobody stepped in to avert the catastrophe, and you’re now trapped inside as it stumbles from one haphazard scene to the next, without even the slightest sense of vision or insight into its characters. It’s a fascinating watch in the abstract, but one that barely holds together on even a basic narrative level, and it feels almost as if it’s been made by an entirely different person than the one who worked on the acclaimed series “True Detective.”
You might expect an old school Vegas romp, but it’s more a derivative copy of countless other sin city-set movies you’ve seen before — including even last year’s infinitely superior “The Last Showgirl.” References are smashed together, and so little care given is given to its characters that you come away wondering who even any of these people were that you just spent all this time with.
That Vince Vaughn’s singing and the film’s dialogue ring equally hollow, despite the film’s insistence that all of this is actually great, would make great comedy if the entire experience wasn’t such a drag.
It’s like a tracing of what a movie like this should be, forcing the viewer to strain and squint to see what it was even going for before you realize the effort is futile. Even when there is the rare, serviceably charming line in isolation, it all gets lost in the one-note song that is the rest of the film.
This all begins with Easy (Vaugmhn), a Vegas crooner who never made it despite his supposed talents (an already dubious assertion that the film treats as fact) and has fallen on some rather hard times after losing his job managing a restaurant after hitting a drunken jerk who harassed his staff. But he soon catches a lucky break: a nearby club needs someone to fill in for night to replace a comedian (fittingly played by Shane Gillis) who bombed left and right.
When Easy steps up to the microphone and belts out some songs, he catches the attention of the former performer Mickey Albano (Al Pacino) who now runs entertainment for the Wynn resort. Mickey offers Easy a job performing at the resort, and he starts to make a name for himself as a must-see singer. Unfortunately, Easy’s troublemaker brother Sam (Simon Rex) arrives, threatening to upend this good thing he’s got going and rob him of his dream once more.
Alas, the film mostly just robs us of our time, and never makes a compelling case for its own existence.
The singing scenes are awkwardly staged and with no real life behind them. And the dialogue, never natural-sounding, is a series of painfully stiff lines read like they should have done another take. And all of it overly reliant on clunky exposition, or on characters who telegraph so clearly that something significant is about to happen so clearly that its arrival merely elicits a shrug. Was it all a stylistic choice? Or just that what we’re seeing was the best they could get?
Everything in “Easy’s Waltz” plays out with such tired and obligatory inevitability, it almost seems like Pizzolatto is attempting to pull one over on us. But instead of being funny or at least entertaining, it’s just exhausting. Subplots get picked up and dropped with little thought about any of them, leaving such a strange feeling of whiplash for a film where almost nothing actually happens.
When we get a quick series of time and location jumps near the end that it then backpedals from, “Easy’s Waltz” loses whatever possible potential it could have had to end on a high note. It’s like a bad cover of a song you’ve heard before, leaving you just wishing you could go back to the original and drive this one out of your mind.
