Shia LaBeouf continues his relentless campaign to prove himself the most tiresome person in the history of cinema, or showbusiness, or the universe. He stars in this fantastically narcissistic and uninteresting drama set in Romania; the location may well have afforded all sorts of tax advantages to its investors and producers, but the film offers very little for the rest of us. LaBeouf plays the annoyingly surnamed Charlie Countryman, a guy who is deeply upset at the death of his mum (a sugary cameo phoned in by Melissa Leo).
She appears to him in a kind of vision, telling him to change his life and go to … Bucharest, of all the crazy, tax-efficient places. There, Charlie falls in love with beautiful, vulnerable cellist Gabi, played with an appalling foreign accent by Evan Rachel Wood. He protects her against an abusive estranged husband apparently called Nigel – Nigel? – played by super-scary foreign person Mads Mikkelsen. There is finally an aerial shot of a dead body, perhaps intended to recall the famous news image of Nicolae Ceausescu’s corpse. This is a movie with a chalk-outline around it.
