Chaos Walking, with Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley

Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland in Chaos Strolling.
Photograph: Murray Shut/Lionsgate

Some motion pictures ought to firmly embrace their innate silliness. The evocatively titled science-fiction movie Chaos Strolling, set on a planet the place the human settlers can all hear — and typically see — one another’s ideas, has the type of premise that sounds intriguing on paper (and earlier than it was a film it was certainly a best-selling novel by Patrick Ness with the much more evocative title The Knife of By no means Letting Go). However as soon as transferred to the display, this concept probably offered all types of issues. Shot in 2017, Doug Liman’s image has been caught in reshoot-and-postproduction limbo for a while, presumably as a result of the filmmakers struggled with how finest to render the characters’ ideas (which feels like one thing they need to have perhaps discovered earlier than making a film about, , individuals who can hear and see one another’s ideas). The tip result’s neither right here nor there, a muttery mess during which characters ceaselessly ruminate in voice-over, accompanied by wispy purple clouds of thought, whereas enacting a totally generic Western state of affairs. You retain ready for that intriguingly goofy setup to repay in some significant, thrilling approach. You retain hoping an enormous thought bubble will fly out of the bushes and whack somebody over the pinnacle.

Alas, no such luck. Chaos Strolling is ready within the gritty frontier city of Prentisstown, on a planet known as “New World,” the place our teenage hero, Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland), works extra time to cover his ideas from others by obsessively repeating the phrases “My title is Todd Hewitt” to himself time and again. For this, he’s bullied mercilessly by the townspeople, particularly Davy (Nick Jonas), the jagoff son of sinister, scheming self-declared mayor David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen).

There are not any ladies in Prentisstown (and we do finally discover out the chilling motive why). However in the future, out of the sky crash-lands Viola (Daisy Ridley), a part of an approaching wave of recent human settlers. Kindly Todd and his two adoptive fathers, Ben and Cillian (Demian Bichir and Kurt Sutter, each wasted), defend Viola from the remainder of the boys, and finally Todd agrees to take her to a distant settlement known as Farbranch. Throughout their journey, the entire hearing-people’s-thoughts factor pays some dividends. Viola is aware of what Todd is pondering, which implies that his overactive teenage needs repeatedly embarrass him in entrance of this lovely house refugee. However she’s reliant on this basically respectable child for her survival, so the 2 come to rely on one another.

There’s a touching concept in Todd’s recounting of his title as a approach of holding his runaway ideas in test. On one degree, I may actually determine with the paralysis and anxiousness that comes from attempting to manage obsessive thought patterns. (And Ness can be the creator of The Remainder of Us Simply Stay Right here, the uncommon YA journey ebook with a hero who has OCD.) There’s one thing thrilling about this character, and Holland, who proved his appearing chops with final 12 months’s otherwise-not-very-good The Satan All of the Time, isn’t a nasty option to play him. However that’s additionally why it’s irritating that Chaos Strolling doesn’t do extra with its conceit. There may be a lot potential right here for weirdness, creativity, terror — one thing to tell apart the movie out of your run-of-the-mill sci-fi journey or glum pseudo-Western state of affairs.

And sure, there’s potential for humor, too. Overheard ideas can usually alienate viewers in mainstream motion pictures. Perhaps that’s why the concept works finest in comedies: Listening to somebody’s ideas tends to make us uneasy, and it may be arduous to retrofit such an inherently uncool concept into an ostensibly bad-ass house journey or struggle drama or no matter. Most of the battles waged over Terrence Malick’s filmography, for instance, finally boil right down to how viewers viscerally reply to the snatches of whispered ideas he likes to put over his beautiful photos: A few of us are moved significantly, others begin instantly snickering.

That’s why Liman isn’t truly a nasty selection for this materials. He’s, in any case, the credited director on Fringe of Tomorrow, a sci-fi flick that took one other offbeat concept — Independence Day meets Groundhog Day, with Tom Cruise dying time and again and coming again to life on the identical day — and turned it into some of the inspiring motion motion pictures of the previous decade. Fringe of Tomorrow wasn’t a comedy, however it was very humorous at instances, leaning into the ridiculousness of its story. (It additionally didn’t make a ton of cash, and struggled by means of reshoots and rewrites, so perhaps Hollywood discovered the fallacious lesson from it.) Chaos Strolling retains a tiny little bit of its comedian spirit, however one does get the sense that perhaps, in some distant tough lower or interim screenplay draft, it was a a lot funnier, extra participating image. As a substitute, what we now have is a film that appears decided to run away from itself.