Conspiracy
theory nutters have widely cited the French film Dark Side of the Moon for supposedly exposing the “Moon Landing
Hoax.” The problem is William Karel’s ostensive expose is actually a
mockumentary poking fun at the very same tone deaf loons taking it for Gospel.
Therefore, it would not be surprising if the same anti-social paranoids
conclude this silly, somewhat slapstick farce is also a defiant act of
Trufe-telling. Break out your tinfoil hat, because Antoine Bardou-Jacquet’s Moonwalkers (trailer here) opens this Friday
in Los Angeles.
As
the wackos heard throughout Room 237 make
abundantly clear, there are people out there who really think Stanley Kubrick
dummied-up the Moon Landing footage for the CIA, which makes no sense if you
know anything about his iconoclastic aversion to ideology and bureaucracy.
Nevertheless, CIA agent Tom Kidman has been ordered to recruit Kubrick to
produce said video, just in case. In point of fact, it is indeed true some
projections gave the Apollo 11 astronauts only a 30% chance of survival.
Of
course, through what is meant to be a comedic chain of events, Kidman is forced
to really on Jonny, a nebbish would-be rock band manager and the band of hippy
dippy experimental filmmakers he sometimes does drugs with. Jonny also happens to
be deeply in debt to a London loan shark, who tried to collect from Kidman’s briefcase
full of cash. Of course Kidman had different ideas, resulting in several dead
thugs and a whole lot of bruised underworld egos. Further complicating matters,
a platoon of Langley Boy Scouts arrive just as the PTSD-suffering Kidman starts
to go native.
There
is way more blood in Moonwalkers than
you would expect in a silly mash-up, which might be the best thing to say about
it. As usual, Ron Perlman is seriously bad and drily funny as Kidman, even with
all the tie-dyed bedlam going on around him. Maybe you have to have nostalgia
for the Harry Potter franchise to get
Rupert Grint. Otherwise, his Jonny just comes across as an annoyingly pathetic
drip. Robert Sheehan and Tom Audenaert deliver shtick and more shtick as Jonny’s
hippy filmmaker pals. At least Erika Sainte generates some heat with Perlman as
the counter-culture vamp, Ella.
