The Circle

James Ponsoldt’s The Circle is one of the most wrongheaded and incompetent movies I’ve seen in some time. I say this as someone who usually watches at least one bad movie a week. Ponsoldt’s (The End of the Tour) movie is the goods, so to speak — at least where unintentional comedy and parades of bad ideas come into play. Based on Dave Eggers novel of the same name, the film has serious inherent flaws, from the source material to the script (written by Eggers and Ponsoldt) to the incredibly uneven performances. It’s genuinely amazing that Ponsoldt never understood where these faults lie. That such a solid and respected (if not spectacular) filmmaker never understood just how goofy the whole enterprise is is honestly amazing in and of itself. It’s almost as if he just gave up — the movie’s that out-and-out-lazy.

The movie desperately wants to be the definitive portrait of the dangers of an out-of-control internet. With all the high-mindedness that the tech industry has about changing the world, there is something a bit inhuman and unnatural about how this revolution is being approached. I know this, and The Circle knows this. But the way the film wants to make its point is in the hokiest, cheesiest and least realistic terms possible, skirting melodrama and never having the visual panache or stakes to make this sort of an intellectual pseudo-thriller work.

Emma Watson plays Mae, whose career has never made it beyond call center temp until she gets her dream job answering phones in customer service for The Circle, a kind of Google/Facebook omnipresent tech company. She’s quickly engulfed into the company’s work culture of participating in extracurricular work activities on her days off and updating her social media presence. This is partly played as satire, partly played for sinister atmosphere with no payoff. Instead, Mae slowly ingratiates herself with The Circle’s heads, Bailey (Tom Hanks) and Stenton (a stiff Patton Oswalt) and mysterious — and suspicious — engineer Ty (John Boyega). She learns that The Circle is perhaps more nefarious than she ever expected, but not before becoming an internet sensation and finding herself the rising star of the company.

The notion that The Circle is up to no good never really pays off since the company isn’t really involved in much besides invading the public’s privacy. Yes, this is all topical, but in our post-Edward Snowden world, it’s not particularly surprising. The Circle does itself no favors, never figuring out how to add any weight to its flimsy story. The best it can do is some cheesy nonsense about Mae stealing a kayak and her longtime best friend Mercer (a dead-eyed Ellar Coltrane, Boyhood) being harangued by denizens of the internet.

There’s some added familial drama, as Mae’s father (Bill Paxton) suffers from multiple sclerosis, but this is handled with zero dignity, and is instead traded for a cheap sex gag and the strangest and least dignified way imaginable of explaining that this character has soiled himself. The whole thing is a mess of tones butting up against one another and ugly decisions.

Honestly, I’m worried I’m underselling just how bad this movie is. It’s almost worth recommending for that reason alone. Rated PG-13 for a sexual situation, brief strong language and some thematic elements including drug use. Now playing at AMC Classic River Hills, Carolina Cinemark, Epic of Hendersonville, Regal Biltmore Grande.