Here's my take on SYNCHRONIC:
2/5
It is very similar to the writer/directors' previous effort, The Endless. First up it's yet another of their Lovecraftian homages.
And, as with their previous film, the first act is cool, the second act sees things starting to unravel, and the third/final act completely falls apart.
I felt the film suffered on a number of levels, chief amongst them being the use of the "Magical Negro" trope (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro).
I kept thinking how they (the writer/director duo) could have avoided such a lame device and realized that if they they had switched the leads, they would have ended up with a "White Savior" trope. In the end they would have been better off with either an all white cast or an all black cast.
Anyway, the first act was stellar, delivering some seriously fugged up imagery, creating a sense of unnerving mystery, and setting us up for some bugged out happenings, but then it just went downhill from there, first with a disease-of-the-week subplot, and finally the aforementioned "Magical Negro" elements.
Aside from that, the writer/directors kept throwing stuff at us, chief amongst these were not-so-subtle allusions to America's racist history,. Yet they never really seemed to flesh these elements out all that well and kind of failed to link them into the present day (granted, there was the cop in the opening scene who almost arrests Anthony Mackie's character because he looks like 2Pac, but they could have mined the modern day racism angle even deeper and tied it in more cohesively to the historical racism elements; all of this just seemed glossed over).
In the end, it was an interesting concept, which I felt was poorly executed.
But, hey, YMMV...
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