Review (Sort Of): Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis”

For around twenty years, when discussing “the worst movie of all time,” I’ve gone back and forth on three films: Random Hearts, Cool World, and Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. All three are bad in different ways: cloying, grating, grasping, hollow.

There’s a new kid in town, though.

I saw Megalopolis late last week and while I’d heard mixed reviews, this is Francis Ford Coppola, the guy who made Apocalypse Now, which is one of the best Harrowing Journeys ever committed to celluloid.

And yet, less than half way through the first act of Megalopolis, there was no way around the fact it was bad. And not just bad, but stupid. Dumb. Lame. Weak. Thin. And all the badness was magnified by the fact the person telling the story obviously thought he was doing some next level stuff.

Everything about this film is bad. Coppola managed to get career-worst performances from the usually-reliable Adam Driver, but also Jason Schwartzman, Dustin Hoffman, and Giancarlo Esposito. The editing is bad. The music is bad. The costuming is preposterous. The script sounds like it was written by a sophomore boy in a beret. I’ve seen original dramas written by teenagers performed in community theaters that were more sophisticated.

I thought of walking out for the first thirty minutes, and yet I kept wishing the movie would get worse and it kept giving me what I wanted. Megalopolis isn’t a film that has a few clunky moments, or a few thematic strands that don’t pan out. Rather, there’s something goofy, stupid, incompetent, cringe, baffling, pretentious, false, or hollow that happens around every thirty seconds for the entire run time. If you took a shot every time something dumb happened, you’d be drunk six minutes into this film. In twenty minutes, you’d be dead.

And yet, Megalopolis is so bad that you should see it. And you should finish it, because just when the movie can’t possibly get dumber, it does, all the way through the final fade to black. See it, and I defy you to name me a worse motion picture.