The Last Thing He Wanted boasts big ideas that never quite gel and a complicated plot that can be challenging to navigate. But that's not what makes it such a frustrating watch.
The bigger issue is that every single scene feels like it's been taken out of context — only it turns out that seeing the entire context doesn't actually help. It's as if an entire season of television had been whittled down to under two hours, or as if someone had taken a book and ripped out chapters at random. It is, in short, completely incoherent.
Directed by Dee Rees from a book by Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted centers on a hard-nosed journalist, Elena (Anne Hathaway), who gets pulled into a dangerous game of international intrigue via an arms deal involving her father (Willem Dafoe). That's the simple version of the story. The long version... honestly I couldn't tell you.
In the end, the biggest question we're left with is how much richer this story might have been if it had had room to breathe.
The film starts out confusing, dropping us into 1982 El Salvador as Elena reports on the civil war. Elena reflects on the country's situation and her own in a voiceover that has presumably been lifted from Didion's novel. But the words don't translate well onscreen, and only serve to distract from our efforts to understand what the hell is going on.
From there, we jump to Elena in 1984. She's frustrated by her paper's decision to axe her coverage of Central America and aggravated by her ambivalent relationship with her father. There's also mention of a battle with breast cancer, the recent death of her mother, and a shaky co-parenting setup with her ex-husband. Other characters dip in and out as well, including a government spook played by Ben Affleck, and many of them drop names that you're supposed to note for when they become important later.
Like Elena herself, The Last Thing He Wanted is an ambitious overachiever. Rees is apparently interested in issues of journalistic integrity and government corruption and American imperialism, in the difficult dynamic between angry daughters and disappointing dads, and between well-meaning mothers and skeptical daughters, in Elena's own journey of soul-searching to figure out what really matters to her and why.
And she and her team work hard to bring them all together. Hathaway frowns at clues so hard she seems in danger of spraining a muscle, and Rosie Perez does her best to breathe urgency into a supporting role as Elena's colleague and confidant. (Affleck, on the other hand, looks like he's sleepwalking.) The script, by Rees and Marco Villalobos, tries earnestly to dole out plot twists at a brisk pace, and explain what needs explaining via exposition dump or flashback.
But even the thrilling twists feel tedious in a story this difficult to follow. Dramatic music cues and horrified facial expressions signal shocking reveals, but good luck figuring out what exactly the reveals are and why they're supposed to be shocking. Hathaway and Affleck might be miscast, or perhaps it's just impossible to parse what they're trying to accomplish in character arcs this muddled.
In the end, the biggest question this film leaves us with is not who's profiting from American-made wars or why, as Elena keeps asking, but how much richer this story might have been if it had had room to breathe.
With its layered themes, intricate storylines, and intriguing supporting characters, The Last Thing He Wanted has a lot of the makings of a great TV drama, delivered patiently over six or ten or eighteen episodes. Heck, even a three-hour movie might have allowed for more connective tissue tying the plot points together. At 115 minutes, though, it's a waste of 115 minutes.
