Sean Penn’s “Flag Day” was met with jeers & cackles at last night’s press screening. What did I exactly witness? The editing was horrendous. The photographer ugly. The dialogue seventh-grade level. Penn used to be a decent filmmaker with his best movie being 2001’s “The Pledge”. What happened?
The actor plays a conman father, a double life counterfeiter/bank robber, who also tries to take care of his parent-hopping daughter, Jen (Dylan Penn). Much like his Cannes-premiered fiasco “The Last Face,” there’s a self-importance here that really bogs the whole thing down, not to mention Malick-like narration from Jen about family that had me cringing in my seat.
Dylan and Penn do share a few lovely scenes together. After all, father-daughter chemistry is not something you can just invent out of thin air, and in such moments, the film does have its charms. The problem is that Sean and Dylan aren’t onscreen together enough — separated throughout and that does kill the nice vibe they have going.
The result is a very frenetic piece of filmmaking, with no coherence whatsoever — it feels almost as though Tony Scott came back from the grave with gushy father-daughter sentimentality and made this film. After these last few Cannes entries, maybe Penn did in fact make some kind of deal with the devil. We, unfortunately, are the targeted victims of it. [C-]