Review for The Limits of Control

The Limit of Control is a thriller set in Spain. An Unnamed Man (Isaach De Bankole) is on a mission that requires him to follow clues left by several mysterious people he encounters. All of these encounters follow the same setup with the exchange of a coded greeting and ends with the exchanging of a matchbox with an unseen note, which he consumes with two espressos. These all finally lead him to his target who he must eliminate.

I cannot begin to describe how much I hated this film.

Now I usually give directors like Jim Jarmusch the benefit of the doubt. He has directed many films that have made very little sense, though have had a deeper meaning and usually held together by a wonderful central performance (A good example of this is Bill Murray in his previous film Broken Flowers). This film was possibly one of the worst, most pretentious, waste of space films I have ever seen and that includes any New Wave French Film you can name. Looking at the cast, I will also say that this is also the biggest waste of a wonderful cast that I have ever seen. Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt. All of them wonderful actors, all of them have won countless awards and starred in many memorable films, this is not one of them and their brief cameos make you wonder why they are there at all? The main performance by Isaach De Bankole is interesting if you wanted a perfect example of a boring character that you don't relate to, know anything about or care in the slightest what he does or his fate.

For a film clocking in at almost two hours, you would think that there would be massive amounts of speeches, existential dialogues about life, the universe and everything. No. Apart from the encounters with the message givers, there is very little dialogue in the film and very little of it makes much sense with De Bankole himself only having a few lines throughout the whole thing. Nothing is revealed about what he is doing, why he is doing it or most importantly, why we should care. We, the audience, are left in the dark throughout the entire film and when we find out at the end that he has someone to assassinate it is such a wishy-washy scene that you wonder why they bothered at all? What was the point in any of it, when it could have simply been one encounter 'Here's your target. Here's where he is. Now go kill.' The fact is, the final five minutes are the only interesting part of the film, but maybe that is because I had a deep hope that it would all come together like a dénouement. No. It doesn't.

Now, of course everyone has gone on about how beautifully Jarmusch filmed Spain and I would agree, if I was reviewing a travel documentary. But I'm not. I'm reviewing what I'm being told is a thriller, with possibly the fewest thrills I have ever seen in my entire life. Analysts and critics can talk all they want about the subtext or the deep inner meanings of this film as much as they like, but they cannot take away the fact that it is a very dull, boring, utterly pointless film and one that everyone involved except for Christopher Doyle the Cinematographer should be ashamed of.