It's even worse than it appears.
Wednesday September 8, 2021; 2:09 PM EDT
  • The Netflix movie Worth got great reviews, and it stars Michael Keaton so I got out the popcorn and sat down to watch with great expectations and came away not liking the movie. That was almost a week ago, and I've had some time to reflect on why it was so bad. #
    • Interestingly, the score on Metacritic for Worth has gone down by 20 points since I looked late last week. Now it gets a 66, "generally favorable" which is not great. But I left the first paragraph alone. #
  • First, Keaton is a great actor, and this was an unusual role for him, playing a lawyer whose job it was to save the economy from being sued to oblivion by the families of victims of 9/11 by giving them money. #
  • Now I'm going to spoil the plot, but it's kind of funny -- you might not even realize this was the plot, esp the second part, after you watched the whole movie, that's how poorly done it was. So here goes. #
    • The families wanted their dead relatives' stories told, they cared less about how much money they got, although the money was important to some.#
    • The families of rich people who died scammed the regular people and they took a lot more of the money from the settlement, and there was nothing Michael Keaton could do about it. #
    • But the most important part of the plot was that Keaton started out as a stiff and heartless lawyer and came out the other end as a champion of the people. Only we never saw the process by which this transformation took place. #
  • The conclusion I came to, after giving this enough time, was that it should have been a 6 to 10-part series. Netflix should have done for the families what they wanted Keaton's character to do. Tell their stories. That's where the juice was. If you want to make Keaton the central thread, that's a good way to do it. But we just got tiny little glimpses of the families here and there, and no understanding of who actually died in the 9/11 attack. And that's a shame, because it could be a good story. Maybe a bit like Six Feet Under. #
  • Anyway as a movie it was imho a failure. Michael Keaton, as always, commands your attention in a good way, just to see someone who's a true artist at his craft. #

copyright 1994-2021 Dave Winer.

Last update: Wednesday September 8, 2021; 3:02 PM EDT.

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