Joanna Reed (Keira Knightley) is convinced her husband Michael (Sam Worthington) has been unfaithful. While Michael is on a business trip with Laura (Eva Mendes), the woman his wife believes he’s cheating with, Joanna runs into Alex (Guillaume Canet), with whom she’d had a brief relationship during a time she and Michael had been estranged--a relationship of which Michael is unaware. As the night progresses, Joanna and Michael will be tempted to test the bonds of their marriage.

CRITIQUE

Last Night is yet another old-hat movie about people who shouldn’t be married to anyone, much less each other. The story and characters go through the exact same motions as so many of these movies, immediately telegraphing what’s to come and then making you wait through a slow slog before confirming what you already suspected. The movie has nothing to say, unless you count its assertion that money and good looks don’t add up to happiness. And if you do count that, I’d like to congratulate you on your first movie-watching experience.

Last Night (which was picked up for domestic distribution by Miramax and given an extremely limited theatrical release a couple months back) marks the directing debut of Massy Tadjedin, who also wrote the script. Tadjedin has two previous screenwriting credits, including the 2005 Adrien Brody flick The Jacket, which also starred Knightley. Like that movie, this one seems “inspired” by other movies, foolishly crawling along under the ridiculous belief that it’s wise, penetrating, and real. Yeah, run-of-the-mill depictions of upper-class ennui are so novel.

The opening scenes make it very obvious where the movie is headed. Knightley’s character is a harpy (which right off the bat makes it hard to care about where her life is headed), downing glasses of wine, getting jealous for absolutely no reason, accusing Worthington of sleeping with Mendes. Her reasoning for this? He didn’t tell her how attractive Mendes was when he first told her about working with Mendes.

As they continue to argue about this, and it keeps being mentioned that Worthington and Mendes are leaving on business trip the next morning, future events become clear. The same is true when Knightley bumps into Canet. As their history is revealed (during which time the harpy becomes a hypocrite), there’s no question as to where the night will take them. There’s also no question as to how the movie will end. Life is unpredictable; most movies that purport to be true to life aren’t, and this one is no exception.

If you hate movies in which the characters sit around and talk about exactly what’s going on in any given scene, this is definitely not the movie for you. Worthington and Mendes have a drink in the bar of the hotel where they’re staying; she practically throws herself at him, he ponders what will happen if he sleeps with her. Their entire conversation is about having a drink in a bar, her flirting with him, what will happen if he gives into temptation. Knightley and Canet go out for dinner with a couple played by Griffin Dunne and Stephanie Romanov.

The Dunne character exists for no other reason than to spout pages and pages of dialogue about marriage and relationships. He asks Knightley and Canet about their past, her about her marriage, him about his girlfriend back in Paris. Knightley and Canet eventually end up back at her apartment, where they move from the couch to the bed, all the while talking about exactly...what...they’re...doing. Spell-it-all-out dialogue is bad enough, so imagine how excruciating it is in a situation where the parties involved would be talking about anything but what they’re doing.

There is one bit where no one says anything, and it serves to illustrate just how little fundamentally unsound Tadjedin’s thinking is. Before he leaves for his trip, Knightley writes Worthington an apologetic note and slips it into the collar of one of the shirts he’s packed. Care to venture a guess as to when he finally discovers the note? Apologizing in a note for something that could ruin your marriage and secreting that note where there’s a chance your spouse won’t find it for a couple days? Really?

The audience is supposed to take that seriously? (Never mind that Worthington is the sort of successful businessman who doesn’t hang up his shirts when he arrives at his hotel. I wish he had, though, as that would have allowed Tadjedin to give us a portentous shot of the note falling unnoticed to the floor, meaning I could have pretended to hear one of those canned collective gasps you hear from the studio audience whenever something similar happens in a bad sitcom.)

Good performances might have made the movie less of a boring chore, but the only person who doesn’t flounder about ineffectually is Knightley, whose schoolgirl giggling and toothy grin during her first scenes with Canet feel real, the genuine reaction of someone suffering from a flood of unexpected emotions. Worthington, unfortunately, is a brick wall, and Mendes is her usually lifeless self, leaving her most noteworthy physical feature to do all of the work (which it does pretty well).

THE VIDEO

Proving they’re just as bad with new releases as they are with catalog titles, Echo Bridge brings Last Night to DVD with a 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer that’s watchable at best and horrendous at worst, doing complete disservice to Peter Deming’s cinematography. The first major flaw comes during the opening credits, the text of which crawls with aliasing, so much so that the words are rendered unreadable (the same is true of the end credits).

The next thing you’ll notice is some oppressive black crush, which renders impenetrable every nighttime exterior and most low-light interiors. On top of that you get washed-out colors (the palette’s already cold and gray enough), a softness that comes and goes, and a flatness and lack of detail that bring to mind a middling cable TV presentation.

But you shouldn’t really expect much from a release that utilizes a single-layer disc, squeezes both a DVD version and a digital copy on said disc, encodes the movie at a very low bit rate (the DVD’s transfer rarely ever hits 3 Mbps), then so heavily compresses all of the content that there’s still more than a gig of free space left over on the disc.

THE AUDIO

There’s really nothing to complain about with the Dolby Digital 5.1 track, but there’s also nothing to get excited about. The sound design favors the fronts, with only some mild atmospherics channeled to the rears. Dialogue is always clear and intelligible, but it’s also generally colorless. A Dolby Stereo track is also included; English SDH subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Unless you count the aforementioned digital copy, no extras are included

FINAL THOUGHTS