THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

After decades of trying to make this movie, Terry Gilliam has done it. Sadly, it isn’t any good. All of our worst fears, about how Gilliam might inject some sorely needed filmic depth into Miguel de Cervantes’s famously shallow if picaresque novel, are proven just. Here is a movie in search of a story.

The 1605 source material might have inspired authors such as Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain to write such gems as “The Three Musketeers” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” but Gilliam has lost the thread if he ever even had it. My suspicion is that Gilliam never did have a grip on a story most famous for having its hero tilting at windmills with a jousting pole from atop his horse. It’s a slapstick image that spells deadly trouble for horse and man alike.

The hook of the book is that society is all wrong; only individuals willing to throw social mores out with the bath water, are able to realize the pure sense of freedom that nature intended. Good luck trying to cozy up to that principal watching “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.”

Billed as an adventure-comedy, this movie is a tragedy. Gilliam got it wrong from the start. Perhaps the filmmaker will learn from his mistake and a movie half as good as “The Fisher King” before his time runs out. For a self-reflexive narrative, complete with a film-within-a-film trope, the sequences don’t add up when the final credits roll. We could have at least had a sex scene. No such luck.

Adam Driver is squandered as Toby Grison, an ad director working on a commercial in Spain that features Don Quixote and his (frequently abused) squire (read manservant). Toby’s boss (Stellan Skarsgård) gifts the director with a VHS copy of a black and white student film Grison made (“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”) a decade earlier. Revisiting his film sends Toby on a journey to rekindle connections with actors living in Los Sueños, a nearby Spanish town. Toby reunites with his Don Quixote (Jonathan Pryce); uninspired (would-be) comic set pieces ensue. Yawn. If only there were at least a few funny lines thrown in. Where is Mel Brooks when you need him?

For anyone like myself who holds Terry Gilliam in high esteem in spite of the fact that he hasn’t made a decent film since “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” back in 1998, you will need to see this filmic atrocity for yourself. You too will know that, in the end, it was Terry Gilliam who killed Don Quixote.

Not Rated. 132 mins.

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