MaXXXine

Nailing a movie trilogy can be tricky. The Godfather Part III, Return Of The Jedi, the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, Halloween Ends, all of these movies followed up successful first and second installments, and none of them lived up to what preceded it. Even my beloved Back To The Future trilogy is guilty. If I step back and be objective about it, I have to admit the trilogy ends on the weakest of the three movies. Ti West’s trilogy of horror movies that started with X and Pearl set a very high bar for its third installment. X used the framework of a 70’s style grimy slasher akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to tell a story of sexual freedom, aspiration, fame, and failure. It somehow elevated slashers into high art. Pearl was a bright technicolor fever dream and a psychological profile of a woman so obsessed with fame that it destroys her and her family. It is an ode to old Hollywood, while still being a tense, gripping look into how passion can become a poison. The stage set was for the concluding chapter, Maxxxine, which was to be set in the 80’s. Unlike other trilogies, West’s isn’t three similar movies; each stand on their own, with distinct styles and different takes on their genre and themes. With love letters to grindhouse and golden age epics already turned into successful horror movies, what would Ti West do for his capper? And could he stick the landing? The answers are “too much”, and “no”. Maxxxine follows Maxine, the lone survivor of X, a few years later. She’s been in porn and knows that, at 33, she’s aging out of it (she says at one point that, in porn, women “age like bread, not wine”), and if she’s gonna the success she thinks she deserves to be, she has to transition to mainstream movies now, so she auditions for a part in a horror movie. She is also being stalked by someone who seems to know her connection to those murders. The Night Stalker is also active at this point, and may or may not be connected. And this is at the height of the Satanic Panic, which plays into it. Maxine had to negotiate all this while chasing her dream of supreme fame. Maxxxine is a lot, and that’s its biggest failing. Ti West kept X and Pearl simple. The themes are simple and the homages are obvious. The characters and themes in X have time to breathe and develop. Pearl is centered on one character, so everything about it builds logically from that. Maxxxine may be structured around one character, but that one character is pulled in so many directions, she almost becomes a passenger in her own story. The movie wants to tie up the loose ends from X, but introduces a new character to facilitate that. It wants to further her quest to be a star, and has to show how far she’s willing to go to do that. She has to deal with the police looking into the murders. The Satanic Panic protesters are on the periphery, and so is the Night Stalker. Maxxxine is a busy movie, too busy for any of its subplots to develop properly, let alone for Maxine to feel like she’s driving the story. The themes are muddled because there’s too many things going on for them to rise up and be heard, and even when they are heard, they don’t feel different from the previous two movies. Whatever voice Maxxxine is supposed to have as a movie and Maxine as a character is muted by unnecessary noise all around. This too-many-ideas also extends to the film’s visual and stylistic language. As I mentioned, X and Pearl were distinct and direct homages to certain kinds of movies. The filing, the framing, the color grading, and the format of the movie itself worked together. X feels like a movie dropped through a wormhole from 1977. Pearl looks and feels like, apart from a few things that would never pass Hays Code scrutiny, it could sit on a shelf next to Don’t Bother To Knock. Maxxxine wants to be a giallo … except when it wants to be a police procedural … except when it wants to be like Angel or Ms. 45 … except when it wants to be an 80’s action movie … except when it wants to be the sequel to X. There is no tonal or stylistic consistency to this movie at all. The constant shifting of identities leaves the movie feeling oddly lacking in an identity. Where X and Pearl dove headfirst into the genre they were styling themselves after, Maxxxine feels like a sampler platter, and the problem with sampler platters is they give you a taste of something. but not enough to satisfy your hunger. This formlessness also extends to the time period itself; Maxxxine’s predecessors dripped with time-appropriate atmosphere. Every moment of them feels like their respective eras (X’s mid 70’s and Pearl’s 1918). Maxxxine certainly looks 1985 and has all the trappings I’d expect from 1985 LA except for one: the sleaze. For a movie about a porn actress in 1985 LA trying to go mainstream, this movie is oddly sanitized. I’m not saying I needed cameras between every actress’ knees, but … come on. This is 1985 LA. Where’s the hair metal bands? Where’s the casting couch producers? If the movie wants to say something about the sleaziness of the industry, SHOW ME SOME SLEAZE. Maxxxine’s version of Los Angeles in the 80’s should feel hedonistic in the extreme. I should come home from the theatre and take a shower. I expected Sodom and Gomorrah and I got Austin, Texas. The worst part of all this is what it does to Mia Goth. In X, she was a firecracker and a joy to watch. She was honestly robbed of an Oscar nomination for Pearl. In Maxxxine … she’s there. I saw her. But “there” is about it, and it’s not because she’s bad. She is sidelined by so much of extracurricular noise in this movie, she doesn’t get the chance to own the role like she did in the other two. And because none of the other characters are built up enough or are present enough to pick up the slack, it leaves the movie not only lacking an identity, but lacking an emotional center. Maxxxine does the worst thing a sequel could do: expect the previous movie to do all the work so it can coast to the finish line. If I sound really down on the movie, it’s because I had very, very high hopes. When I saw X, I knew it would be my #1 movie of the year and nothing would touch it. I was shocked when Pearl came out and bested it, and nothing I’ve seen since has threatened the 1-2 punch of those movies as my top of class for 2022 (and my top 10 for that year has, like, 9 movies with ***** ratings). Ti West hit grand slams with those two movies. Maxxxine is a tragic fall from grace for me. It's not an unwatchable mess. It’s entertaining, sure; I wasn’t bored at all, and Kevin Bacon is a scenery chewing monster in the best way. The homages to giallo are well done. It is a perfectly fine movie … but as the closing chapter of a trilogy where the first two are indisputable masterpieces of modern horror, Maxxxine being okay falls way, way short of the bar.