Sunday, January 28, 2018

Review: Have A Nice Day

Image courtesy of Strand Releasing.
Jian Liu's "Have a Nice Day" led me to believe that its maker has been watching a fair amount of Quentin Tarantino movies. The filmmaker is a few decades late as the period during which others stole from that filmmaker - who himself is a master of homage - reached its peak in the late 1990s.

The film - which features relatively murky animation and an abundance of dingy locales - is a brief and occasionally amusing picture that follows a bag of money that switches hands among a group of criminals - some hardened, others of the novice variety - and leads to a fair amount of bloodshed as it makes the rounds.

As the film opens, a crime boss is threatening a lifelong friend - who is tied up and bloodied - after he finds out that the man has had an affair with his girl. He gets a call that a young man has stolen money from one of his cohorts and sends out a violent thug, who is constantly slurping from a cup, to retrieve it. Into the mix are thrown the thief's girlfriend's sister and her long-haired pal, a man and woman who throw the kid in the back of their jeep and various others.

The paths of these various characters cross and, needless to say, some of those paths end in a brutal manner. And that pretty much sums up "Have a Nice Day," which reminded me slightly of the films of Satoshi Kon - who was responsible for "Perfect Blue" and "Tokyo Godfathers" - in terms of the animation style, although Kon's films tended to be thematically richer than this one.

There are some odd flights of fancy, one of which in particular - a daydream sing-a-long involving two of the characters - doesn't work. It also doesn't help that we know so little about the film's characters, who spend much of their time chasing the money and inflicting violence on others. The picture occasionally includes some peculiar delights - a dog taking a piss on one of the film's many unlikable characters, what appears to be a gigantic Komodo dragon crossing a train track - but on the whole, "Have a Nice Day" is too fleeting (a mere 77 minutes) and in the debt of better films that it is emulating to leave much of an impression.

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