“Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” the third characteristic by the writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Woman Walks House Alone at Night time”), is a quasi-superhero film that feels in line with one thing like “The Suicide Squad” or “Birds of Prey.”
It, too, lays exhausting on the confetti-colored visuals and slick violence. And its lead, Mona Lisa (Jong-seo Jun), a psychological hospital affected person with telekinetic skills, is just a hero insofar as we’re rooting for her to come back out on prime.
Having damaged out of the asylum, her mangled straitjacket mistaken for a vogue assertion, Mona Lisa meets the intelligent stripper-single mom Bonnie (Kate Hudson), whom she saves from an unceremonious beat down. Clean-eyed and utterly out of contact with the methods of the world, Mona Lisa is a mostly-silent, Edward Scissorhands-like character who is likely to be mistaken for an harmless had been she not additionally a literal puppet grasp in a position to management individuals’s our bodies along with her thoughts.
Bonnie takes benefit of her new pal, directing the directionless Mona Lisa to drive strangers into making sizable A.T.M. withdrawals. Naturally, there’s additionally a decided cop (Craig Robinson) on their tail, with the stakes of the manhunt heightened by an unconvincingly cute friendship between Mona Lisa and Bonnie’s son, Charlie (Evan Whitten).
The setting, a violet-drenched New Orleans, takes on the sweaty haze of a 3 a.m.-nightclub, however for all its glowing hyper-stylization and giddy needle drops, “Mona Lisa” solely ever manages to tread shallow waters. Its comedy lands flat and its moments of emotional catharsis (when, as an illustration, Mona Lisa scares off Charlie’s egg-tossing bullies, or Charlie clashes along with his neglectful mom over her exploitation of Mona Lisa) really feel perfunctory. The film, as a rule, has the appear and feel of an edgy music video, which wouldn’t essentially be an issue if it weren’t additionally oddly boring.
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
Rated R for bloody self-inflicted violence and avenue assault. Operating time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and out there to lease or purchase on Apple TV, Google Play and different streaming platforms and pay TV operators.