Terminal Is All Weirdness All The Time And The Results Are Yawn-Inducing

Watching a piece of art prance around under the assumption that it's as strange as can be while actually being incredibly mundane and even boring is such an uncomfortable experience. It's like the cinematic version of listening to a guy at a party ramble on and on about his conspiracy theories about the Illuminati like he's cracked the code on how the world works when he's just regurgitating the same o'l nutty codswallop people with tinfoil hats have been saying for years. So it is with Terminal, a motion picture that fancies itself as something like a provocative slice of abnormality but it's really just predictable more often than not and ends up being the last thing any of these type of movies want to be called: lame.


Taking place in a crumbling terminal station located somewhere in Europe, Terminal hops around various storylines with the one connective link being the character of Annie (Margot Robbie), a mysterious figure who has numerous outfits and identities with which she can manipulate a variety of seedy male characters for her own personal gain. Among such characters are a dying teacher by the name of Bill (Simon Pegg) and Alfred (Max Irons) an assassin that becomes a lover for Annie. These two occupy differing storylines, with Bill's plotline consisting mainly of Bill and Annie talking about Bill's impending demise over coffee while Alfred's plotline is slightly more expansive and spans multiple locations as he gradually turns on his partner, Vince (Dexter Fletcher).

The underground world these characters inhabit is one of rampant violence and betrayal and none of it is creatively brought to life. Terminal prides itself on being as dementedly quirky as possible like it's peak early Tim Burton filmmaking but it, unfortunately, ends up being only as good as the nadir of modern-day Tim Burton filmmaking. It's pretty simple to see why the movie doesn't work at all, it's entirely resting on its supposed strangeness to carry it to artistic victory but the feature really isn't all that strange. The non-linear narrative structure, for instance, doesn't really add much of anything to the proceedings while details like recurring references to lines from Alice In Wonderland have been done so much better elsewhere.

Akin to the Red Queen's Race in the Alice In Wonderland sequel Alice Through The Looking Glass, Terminal piles on what it thinks is all kinds of twisted details in hopes of getting somewhere but it such effort is all in vain and goes nowhere. Things only get worse once we get to the barrage of twists in the third act, Lord knows anyone who's seen even a handful of lackluster genre films can guess what tragic backstory informs the rage that fills up Annie while the final scene takes a cue from fellow Summer 2018 dud Extinction in dropping an intended-to-be impactful twist ending that requires far too much explanation to fit into the previously established narrative (and even then it really doesn't work).

The entirety of Terminal is dedicated to the banalest kind of nuttiness, there are no attempts at avant-garde imagery or editing that might actually challenge or disorient the senses. No sir, badly executed twist endings and the very existence of strippers are treated as the ultimate act of twisted preposterousness here, and since that's all Terminal focuses on, that means that there's really nothing else here to distract from just how tedious its failed attempts to be shockingly weird are. None of the characters are even entertainingly weird and in a film like this you'd think the rampant lunacy in the story would be a good opportunity to go nuts with some wacky characters. No such luck as good actors like Simon Pegg (continuing his shockingly poor track record with movies that aren't franchise films or Edgar Wright joints) phone it in under the lackluster direction of Vaughn Stein.

Leading the cast is Margot Robbie (who also produced this adventure) and the lack of distinctiveness in the individual characters gets hammered home by how few differences there are in the various identities Annie takes on throughout the story. Robbie is an incredibly talented performer, last year's I, Tonya cemented that, she could have totally been a lot of fun in her various personas, but she's mostly stuck playing discount Harley Quinn here in a role that wastes her completely. Her character and everyone else in the world of Terminal may be as mad as a hatter, but they sure aren't interesting, I'll tell you that much.