DARK WEB: CICADA 3301 (2021)
Tagline: We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. Good Luck.
(Action, Dark Humor, Thriller) [R]
What brought my attention to this movie was looking up some of the DC TITANS TV show stars and seeing what else they had been in. This movie popped up and bam, it’s got two of the TITANS in it. Conor Leslie (Wonder Girl from TITANS) plays Gwen and Alan Ritchson (Hawk from TITANS, but is also Raphael from TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES) plays Agent Carver.
Essentially in this one secretive organization called Cicada 3301 is recruiting super-smart techy people for their super-secret boy band. Actually, they want to run the world via well-placed human proxies and powerful agents, etc. by basically blackmailing them. Smartypants Connor (played by Jack Kesy who is best known for BAYWATCH) decides to play the long game of "solve the ridiculous brain exploding complex riddles" along with Gwen who seems really just like she doesn’t want to be involved at first. They are aided by Avi (played by Ron Funches who is best known as the voice of Fox from “Final Space”) who is an extremely connected friend of Connor’s. Can Connor find solve the mysteries in this global conspiracy?
First off let me say the first hour and 15 minutes of this movie are pretty funny at times, very interesting, and well shot. None of the acting is bad in this and none of the actors seem to have mailed their performances in for a paycheck. I like the concepts and throughout this movie, Connor is actually telling his side of the story to what looks like a panel of NSA judges. Because of this, he purposely bends the story so at times it’s hard to tell what in the story really happened and what didn’t. I mean we have dudes in dear heads and baby heads running around, everyone is paranoid, people are getting beat up. It’s all pretty nuts.
Where this damn thing goes completely off the rails is in the last 29 to 35 minutes or so. I don’t want to spoil what happens in case you want to waste your time watching it, but by the end of the movie, I actually regretted watching it. I can see how it might appeal to certain personalities but I like my movies to have at least one of the main characters have a shred of decency. Maybe in the grand scheme of things that is exactly what happened, but that isn’t what I got out of the film. I just couldn’t freakin stand the last stanza in this otherwise fairly solid and fairly fun film. I also highly disliked that they completely ditched Sophia (played by Alyssa Cheatham) as a character about mid-movie with almost no explanation.
What we got was, for the most part, clever and I expected a certain level of darkness in the humor given the title, but I wouldn’t ever watch this movie again and that says something. I can’t in good faith recommend it. For me this is was the 2nd worst movie of the first half of 2021 and I give it a 2 out of 7. A 3 is just too high That is how important it is to actually finish your movie with something that doesn’t kill the entire setup or ruin almost every character.
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