Coppola’s epic of hot air and waffle is a Megaflopolis

The 85-year-old director has spent 40 years on his near-future New York, but an all-star cast and $US120 million can’t disguise a threadbare film.

This is 138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isn’t there.

Megalopolis

★

In cinemas later this year

Forty years in the making, dollars 120 million of his money, and Francis Ford Coppola finally delivers this head-wrecking abomination.

Yes, he changed cinema with The Godfather, and yes, it’s inspiring to witness an 85-year-old film-maker working on ostensibly epic material, but also, well, no. This is 138 stultifying minutes of ill-conceived themes, half-finished scenes, nails-along-the-blackboard performances, word-salad dialogue and ugly visuals all seemingly in search of a story that isn’t there.

Adam Driver stars in Megalopolis

In its place, instead, is a bizarre version of exposition overload that mostly features Adam Driver in a Madchester haircut as Cesar Catilina, a pontificating bore who likes discussing the merits of city planning and human creativity.

Catilina is the chairman of the Design Authority in a near-future New York that has been awkwardly renamed New Rome and given a lethargic semi-classical makeover. Here the locals read “Tempus” magazine (for Time) and the women are conveniently forced to wear transparent togas (the men still do suits, natch), but otherwise it’s basically New York.

For instance, Catilina plans his huge city-wide reforms from an office in the Chrysler Building, and there becomes an enemy target for the evil banker Hamilton Crassus (Jon Voight) and the resentful mayor Franklyn Cicero (yep, even the names become wearisome).

Catilina, we learn, has also invented a new building material called Megalon that is glowy and yellow and promises to revolutionise something about something that’s never fully explained. But it doesn’t seem to matter because - look - there’s Shia LaBeouf, completely off the leash, and seemingly acting in his own movie as a Judas Priest groupie called Clodio Pulcher. He’s about to be investigated by Dustin Hoffman’s corporate fixer Nush Berman until Hoffman inexplicably disappears from the film.

Chloe Fineman, Laurence Fisburne, Aubrey Plaza, Adam Driver, Francis Ford Coppola and Nathalie Emmanuel leave after the screening of Megalopolis at Cannes Film Festival. Picture: Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP

Then there’s Laurence Fishburne, effectively playing Catilina’s wise black butler, which is not a great look. Or there’s Aubrey Plaza miscast in one of only two sizeable female roles, playing a vampy seductress called Wow Platinum (I know, stop!), who seems to have emerged directly from a raunchy Sharon Stone thriller.

The other female role is the idealistic Julia Cicero, played by the British actress Nathalie Emmanuel at her most bamboozled.

Julia’s tasks as a character include falling for Catilina’s genius, drooling over the size of his Megalon, and eventually succumbing to one of the worst, creepiest kisses in screen history. This is not a great movie for women.

It’s not, in fairness, a great movie for men either, or human beings in general. It’s all hot air and waffle held together, barely, by film-making at its most threadbare.

The Times