Critics tore this film limb from limb almost without exception, but I found it to be an engaging and neat experience despite or, in certain cases, because of its imperfections. The film opens with the inglorious hospital-bed death of the mother of the title character, played by Shia LaBeouf in a further bid to move away from his prior child-star status. Moments later, the ghost of the mother (or a manifestation of his imagination) tells him he should travel to Romania, and he does. Why not? This grim absurdity sets the tone for a film which sways with mad abandon from the comic to the magical to the tragic to the good old-fashioned violent. On the plane, the charming older gentleman seated next to him dies mid-flight, which leads Charlie to his beautiful and fragile daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), with whom he falls in love, a bond complicated by her prior union with a jealous and volatile gangster (Mads Mikkelsen).

Designed as Fear and Loathing in Bucharest for Generation Y, the film is honestly a bit daft: it is beholden to its flights of fancy and its Wonderland indebted version of logic, and it finds its way to its actual "storyline," involving two criminals' pursuit of an incriminating videotape, over an hour in. Yet the performances are persuasive: LaBeouf, anxious and earnest and exploding with both grief and romantic longing, is an engaging anchor, while Evan Rachel Wood exudes the type of melancholic elegance and potent sexuality required to convince the audience men could go to war for her hand. And the scene stealing Mikkelsen is as magnetic and menacing as ever; in his most fiery moments here, he is truly frightening and unpredictable in a way screen antagonists too rarely are. The film also won my admiration with its sense of psychedelic style and propulsive pace. Simply put, it is cool: cool to hear, cool to see, and cool to lose oneself in. The hypnotic music, including a perfectly utilized cut by the xx, and atmospheric on-location-in-Bucharest photography grip the viewer, or at least did this viewer, and compensate for any auctorial shortcomings.

B+

I expected this to be pure trash and to be bored out of my mind, but the movie had my attention from beginning to end. Mikkelsen can be such a bad-ass.