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Serenity: New Anne Hathaway movie has such an awful twist people are desperate to see it

It's ending is being touted as one of the most 'gobsmacking' reversals in recent memory – but not for the right reasons

Jacob Stolworthy
Friday 25 January 2019 03:49 EST
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Serenity - Trailer

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New film Serenity is getting some pretty eyebrow-raising reviews.

The film, from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, serves as an Interstellar reunion, with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway both starring, but falls way short of the mark of Christopher Nolan’s film.

While the consensus is the film is as ludicrous as its synopsis (which you can see below), it seems to be so awful it’s winning over critics (for example, The Guardian calls it a “thrillingly awful thriller” – but gives it three stars).

Serenity is also said to feature a twist that’s being touted as one of the most “gobsmackingly” awful reversals in recent memory. In fact, it’s meant to be so bad that cinema-goers are expressing a desire to see the film just so they can know exactly how the twist plays out.

The film’s synopsis reads: “Baker Dill is a fishing boat captain who leads tours off of the tranquil enclave of Plymouth Island. His peaceful life is soon shattered when his ex-wife Karen tracks him down. Desperate for help, Karen begs Baker to save her – and their young son – from her abusive husband. She wants him to take the brute out for a fishing excursion — then throw him overboard to the sharks.

“Thrust back into a life that he wanted to forget, Baker now finds himself struggling to choose between right and wrong.”

Below is a roundup of the most hilarious reviews so far.

The Guardian

“[Serenity is] a thrillingly awful thriller. A dash of the unexpected provides the finishing touch to any January movie worth its salts, and Knight has successfully smuggled one of the most gobsmackingly ill-conceived twists in recent history into multiplexes nationwide. To reveal it here would rob the film of a measure of its great and terrible power.”

Vanity Fair

“[It’s a ] film so magnificently ill-conceived that it instantly earns a spot alongside I Know Who Killed Me and The Number 23 in the pantheon of great terrible movies. And that’s even before the emergence of a late-stage left-hand turn that throws the entire movie into twisted relief.”

Entertainment Weekly

“You can almost set your watch to it. Every January, as moviegoers race to catch up with the previous year’s high-profile Oscar hopefuls, the studios dump their lower-profile junk on unsuspecting audiences. [Serenity‘s] inevitable stench of January-ness kicks in and it jackknifes so completely off the rails, your jaw just falls right into your lap.

Polygon

“I can’t imagine that there’s a single other movie coming out this year that will match it for how utterly unbelievable it is. That alone makes Serenity worthy of distinction, despite how impossible it is to figure out exactly what audience the film was meant for. A movie that swings wildly for the fences and misses is infinitely more memorable than one that never tries.”

Serenity is released in the UK in cinemas and on Sky Movies on 1 March.

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