This scene is one of the more unintentionally funny moments from The Greatest, which I just suffered through. On at least five different occasions, I asked my wife: “This is a real movie? With real actors?”

I remember when it premiered at Sundance, and all of the reports were like: “Surprisingly, The Greatest hasn’t found a distributor yet, even though it stars Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, and Carey Mulligan*. Economy!” Turns out it’s just awful. That’s why no one bought it. Michael Shannon is the best actor in it, and he’s in a coma for most of the running time. That does mean that we get treated to a bunch of boring scenes of Susan Sarandon reading to a guy in a coma though. And we get those while cutting away from scenes that have actual conflict and stakes.

Tonally, the movie’s all over the place. For example, Pierce Brosnan is at the beach, watching his son swim, grieving the death of his other son, and he starts overreacting and acting all scared that the undead son is too far out in the water. Because he’s over-protective, because now this son is all he’s got, right? Psychology. And then he’s okay again and lovingly throws Susan Sarandon into the water, but then Susan Sarandon looks all depressed because her wallet flies out of her pants and has a picture of a random kid she met in the grocery store, which reminds her of kids, which reminds her of her son, who is dead, and she’s sad now? I hated this movie.

At the very least, if this could get financed, it makes me feel better about the fifty pages of screenplay that I have lying around here. I just have to write in a scene in which the mother sleepwalks screaming, “Where’s my baby?” Then I could get Susan Sarandon.

*- To be fair to Mulligan, she’s so cute in this that I wanted to curl her into a duffle bag and feed her Lucky Charms while walking around all day with her slung over my shoulder. Or something. At least she attempts an American accent, whereas Pierce Brosnan abandoned any hope of that long ago. He just continues to play Pierce Brosnan, and we don’t even get a courtesy line in the script about how he was a foreign exchange student from Ireland and ended up staying here or whatever.

[Anyway…]