‘The Desperate Hour’ Is An Entire Movie About Naomi Watts Going On A Run
Brace yourself for an hour and a half of jogging, limping, and product placement.
If you’ve got a hankering for seeing Naomi Watts go for a run in some sort of depressing US town where the word coffee is pronounced ‘kawfee’, then you’re in for a treat.
— Warning: Devastating spoilers for ‘The Desperate Hour’ ahead. —
The Desperate Hour, which recently dropped on Paramount+, plops us into the world of the recently bereaved widow Amy (Watts) — who, after struggling to get her teenage son out of bed for school, declares that she’s going on a run.
She then goes for that run. And as you can imagine, this goes on for a while. “This character really is running!” you’ll say to yourself. And you’d be right.
As the Watts character runs alongside a tranquil stream of water and some admittedly gorgeous autumnal foliage, you know that something is surely going to happen. Anything. Because this is, after all, a movie. And a movie’s got to move.
It’s when we see some police cars whoosh by, and her iPhone sound an emergency alarm, that you’ll sense something is afoot. (That is, apart from a very long ad for an iPhone 13.)
The School Shooting
Amy learns that a shooting has broken out at her son’s high school, and much of the movie is spent with Watts running around — making and receiving calls — to figure out whether or not her son went to school that day, if he’s alive, and how she can make her way to the school.
And look, I like average thrillers as much as the next gal, but there’s so much about this movie that makes no sense. At one point, Watts makes calls to a bunch of friends to try and get a lift to her son’s school. As her friends aren’t available, she ends up asking Siri how to get there on foot. “Shortest route”, she declares. Why doesn’t she just jog back home and use her car? And do people use Siri?
At one point, all her frantic sprinting-while-on-a-call means that she dramatically falls over a tree branch more than once, which means we often get to see her do some excellent limp acting. The limp comes and goes throughout the film.
There’s also the fact that she keeps calling 911; at one point even because she seemingly wants the dispatcher, Deidra, to calm her down. My god, Amy. Can we leave Deidra to do her job?
The Audacity of Amy
Here’s what takes the cake. Towards the end of the film, when Amy finally gets in a Lyft (is this a Lyft advertisement too?), she decides it’s a good idea to get the number of the 31-year-old shooter via manipulative and probably illegal means, before casually giving him a buzz. As she does so, we learn is in the same room as her son, and with platitudes like “I know you’re hurting” and “they’re good kids”, she attempts to diffuse the situation.
Why would an active shooter be taking calls from anyone while still in the school? Let alone an unknown number? It beggars belief that any of this would happen, and the idea that Watts would have any success in her attempt to talk down a murderer in the middle of his bloody rampage? My god.
That the cops end up using Amy as some sort of hostage negotiator who manages to keep the shooter distracted for long enough to get her son rescued is just an insult to the audience, not to mention the real survivors of school shootings across the US.
And look, we all know that Watts is a great actor and you’ve got to give her props for essentially acting an opposite an iPhone. But if you want to watch a great thriller replete with screens, dings and boops: I would urge you to see Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 debut Searching (starring John Cho) or The Guilty (with Jake Gyllenhaal) instead.
As for The Desperate Hour? You’re better off leaving this one be. Watch the trailer below, if you dare.
The Desperate Hour is streaming on Paramount+ now.
Reena Gupta is Junkee’s culture writer. Follow her on Twitter.