Review: Terminal

"There is a place like no other on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery and danger. Some say to survive it, you need to be mad as a hatter." With that opening voiceover salvo, it's difficult not to have high hopes for the neon-drenched pulp noir, Terminal. Alas, despite a deliciously demented performance by the immensely watchable Margot Robbie, the film is a disappointment, plodding when it should be fleet-footed, and too laboriously enslaved to its influences, which range from Alice in Wonderland to Sin City.

Robbie stars as Annie, an assassin first seen in a church confessional attempting to sweet talk an unseen figure into giving her the majority of his business. First, however, she'll have to eliminate the competition in order to earn the position as his primary gun for hire. Next we see Annie, she's traded in her brunette bob for a blonde pin-up do and working as a waitress in a diner, where, one night, she strikes up a conversation with Simon Pegg's terminally ill professor Bill, who is trying to find muster the courage to kill himself.

Along the way, Annie crosses paths with two hit men, one (Dexter Fletcher) an exasperated misogynist wary of her wiles and another (Max Irons) who is more than happy to fall for her charms. Also in the mix is a train station janitor (Mike Myers), who is not so deceptively superfluous to the unnecessarily convoluted narrative. Predictably, there are twists and turns and double and triple crosses to be had, though writer-director Vaughn Stein overestimates his own cleverness in tweaking noir genre tropes. The seams in this patchwork of a film are all too visible, and Terminal comes across as a series of scenes ostensibly connected yet jarring in their disjointedness. The actors do their best with their heightened portrayals but, as there's no real character for any of them to play, they all ring hollow. The exception is Robbie, who is spellbindingly venomous and intoxicatingly psychotic as femme who is oh so fatale.

If there's anything to genuinely recommend Terminal other than Robbie's presence, it is the last 20 or so minutes of the film where it finally achieves a level of bonkers outrageousness that is utterly difficult to resist. If only that giddy insanity had been injected earlier, Terminal would have been a far different, far more entertaining film than the often dull and ludicrous one it is.

Terminal

Directed by: Vaughn Stein

Written by: Vaughn Stein

Starring: Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Dexter Fletcher, Mike Myers, Max Irons, Katarina Cas, Nick Moran, Jourdan Dunn