THE LOVERS (2015)

Genre: Action/Adventure
Director: Roland Joffé
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Bipasha Basu, Tamsin Egerton, Alice Englert
Runtime: 1 hr 50 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Violence & Coarse Language)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 26 March 2015

Synopsis: After a dangerous dive to save his wife Laura trapped while exploring an 18th century merchant ship wreckage, Jay Fennel, a rugged and attractive marine archaeologist lies brain dead in a Boston hospital. Jay's dream-like coma takes us back in time to Pune, India in 1778. The Brits are invading the palaces and a young British captain named James Stewart (who bears a striking resemblance to Jay) is about to embark on a dangerous mission. Along the way he encounters murder, deceit, betrayal and revenge. He falls deeply in love with an Indian She-warrior named Tulaja, an impossible love which he must fight for. Only the power of a ring can transcend time and save a life.

Movie Review:

Roland Joffe is no stranger to tales of white men in foreign lands, but you won’t be able to tell that from watching ‘The Lovers’. Written and directed by the same person behind far superior films such as ‘The Killing Fields’, ‘The Mission’ and ‘City of Joy’, it strives to be the sort of sweeping historical epic that Hollywood blockbusters were once the stuff of, but fails in such a spectacular manner that you cannot help but wonder just what Joffe had in mind in the first place.

The title refers not just to the fact that it is at its heart a romance but also of the two rings which join a pair of Josh Hartnetts across space and time. The one we first encounter is a marine archaeologist in 2020, who loses consciousness while attempting to save his wife trapped under wreckage and fast running out of air while diving in the Great Barrier Reef. The other is a Scottish officer serving the English crown in colonial India circa 1778, who falls in love with Bollywooy beauty Bipasha Basu, who plays the lady-in-waiting to the rightful queen, in the midst of being entwined in some thorny power struggle within the monarchy.

According to the wise religious man who intones the almighty truth at the start, the two rings which joined to form the shape of a serpent were meant to signify true love, and the lovers united by the rings would be destined to be together forever. Because Hartnett the archaeologist finds one of the two rings before he goes into a coma, it stands to reason – whether as narrative cliché or otherwise – that the key to his survival lies in discovering the other ring. Never mind about how his wife manages to find the other half – how the two Harnetts are linked across time and space is what we are supposed to find out by the end, and yet Joffe never manages to tie the sci-fi elements together.

In line with his imperialist tendencies, Joffe spends an awful lot of screen time delineating the tension among the various factions with vested interests in the palace coup. At first, it is the king’s brother, who murders the king in a desperate bid for power. Then it is the assassins sent by the illegitimate king’s equally power-hungry wife, who go after Hartnett and his men escorting the queen and her lady-in-waiting. And finally, it is the crown’s colonialists, who take advantage of the domestic instability to launch a war just so they can fill their own coffers by establishing a trading empire. Frankly, the tangle of shifting alliances is more silly than intriguing, and no more than a lame excuse for some poorly choreographed battle scenes.

Even more baffling is the central romance between Hartnett and Basu, which unfolds over the course of some of the clunkiest exposition we’ve heard in a while. Joffe is no romantic, that much is clear, and however the other characters try to convince us that theirs is a testament to the eternal qualities of love, there is no emotional resonance to their ill-fated dalliance. To make the unpalatable even more so, the two actors have no chemistry with each other, so much so that it is painful to watch them share the screen together. And really, do not even bother trying to make sense just why the two Hartnetts are even supposed to be linked in the first place, because there is simply no reason offered for why their fates are caught up together at all.

Hartnett’s flaws as an actor only seem more glaringly obvious amidst the film’s other shortcomings. It has been some time since he’s taken lead but that time-off has not done his hollow acting any good. Notwithstanding his bad attempt at an English accent, there is absolutely no depth to his portrayal either as the ill-fated archaeologist or as the equally ill-fated servant of the Company. The fact that he fails to differentiate either role is even more damning of his failures as an actor, and one more reason why the film as a whole is no more than ham-fisted kitsch of the worst kind.

What got over Joffe to even contemplate a project like ‘The Lovers’ is beyond us, but since he is both writer and director of this hot mess, the blame is squarely his to bear. Whether as some sweeping romance or a time-travel sci-fi or as a period piece, it is an abysmal piece of filmmaking that is all but an embarrassment for the once acclaimed English-French director. Unlike the rings its title is meant to represent, this is a film of two inert disjoint halves, neither one compelling in any form, in this time and place or another.

Movie Rating:

(Josh Hartnett’s hollow acting is but one of the many flaws of this bland and derivative mishmash of a sweeping historical epic and time-travel science-fiction)

Review by Gabriel Chong