Freaky Tales review – Pedro Pascal-led 80s anthology isn’t freaky enough

More often than not, the opening night slot at Sundance has become more curse than blessing, too many films living and dying in just one night, barely to be seen again. Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s sci-fi comedy The Pod Generation anyone? How about the Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore melodrama After the Wedding? Daisy Ridley’s suicide drama Sometimes I Think About Dying? Or maybe that sequel to An Inconvenient Truth that you didn’t even know existed? This year’s sacrificial lamb, the 80s-set anthology Freaky Tales, is nothing if not confident in its ability to make an impact, asserting itself as an experience that won’t easily be forgotten.

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Acting as its own hype man, the film begins with a block of narrated opening text positioning what we’re about to see as a “hella wild” ride, a promise that had already been made during its introduction, excitably sold to us as something that would make certain audience members’ heads explode. But while the film’s makers – the writer-director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck – might seem to think that they’ve made a new cult classic, it’s hard to share in their bullish enthusiasm, eye-rolling fatigue meeting their insistence that this is something to be quoted, rewatched and adored. For as bold as Boden and Fleck seem to think Freaky Tales is, it’s a hodgepodge of things we’ve seen done before and done better, a sub-Tarantino fanboy assembly of vaguely interconnected stories that belongs less in the 80s and more in the mid-to-late 90s when every American indie wannabe was trying to emulate their new icon.

We’re taken back to 1987, dropped into a vibrant but tense Oakland, California, and told about a glowing green substance that has an unusual effect on those who encounter it. There are punks taking on Nazis (led by Scream 7’s Jack Champion and the Expats newcomer Ji-young Yoo), a pair of female rappers taking on a rap battle (an acting debut for Normani alongside Wakanda Forever’s Dominique Thorne, a standout), a debt-collecting killer for hire taking on his bosses (the man of the moment Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn, regrettably going full ham) and an NBA star taking on the criminals who have targeted his life (the Insecure star Jay Ellis). The stories are presented as separate, titled tales but often intertwine, connective tissue being the theme of the underdog. But what should be easy catharsis – skinheads, racists, misogynists, homophobes and killers all being avenged, often violently – is made hard by Boden and Fleck’s inability to give us a rousing win. The battles that take place, whether they’re fought by words or action, are all flubbed; rushed and poorly developed involving characters we know little of doing something we don’t really care about. Cheers replaced by shrugs.

Boden and Fleck came to Sundance in 2006 with the punchy and persuasive Ryan Gosling drama Half Nelson but have had a strange, off-key career since. There have been highs – the sensitive baseball story Sugar – but more recently lows – the point and shoot anonymity of Captain Marvel. On paper, Freaky Tales seems like a response to the thankless grunt work of operating within the MCU and it’s clearly a film that has personal resonance for the pair but it becomes the most alienating type of one-for-us project, a self-indulgent home movie somehow made for the big screen. Their nostalgia for the era is shown to us in a string of lists, naming 80s films for the sake of naming 80s films, at its worst in an embarrassing video store scene involving a bizarre A-list cameo running through the best underdog movies of all time. The same can be said of the music, needle-drop upon needle-drop, encouraging the kind of point-at-the-screen “I know that too” nostalgia that has consumed so much of pop culture, as if the mere act of recognition is enough.

The plotting is sloppy but somehow smug, a mystery box put together by people too focused on the wrapping to care about what’s inside (a double-bill with Saltburn awaits!). There’s an over-reliance on pointless visual gimmicks, (did we need an animated baseball sequence or an aspect ratio change or two characters’ inner thoughts represented as doodles?) but the film is otherwise sleekly made and post-Marvel, shows the pair to have developed as strong commercial film-makers. The final gory setpiece is effectively choreographed if a little too pastiche-y to stick, yet like so much of the film, seems as if it were based on a graphic novel, making the film a strange and ungainly companion piece to Captain Marvel. Is it their attempt to have the fun they wanted from that project but on their own terms? Maybe. But for a film so clearly designed to be fun above all else, it ends up being a bizarre slog. I’m glad they enjoyed themselves so much, shame we couldn’t join in.

• Freaky Tales is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution