You Were Never Really Here (2018) *

Directed by:  Lynne Ramsay

Starring:  Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola, Judith Roberts, Alex Manette

I placed the DVD of this movie into my ancient DVD player and the message "Disc Error" read.   I tried three more times to start the DVD and the same error message returned.    I was about to give up, but gave it one more try.   The DVD finally worked, which in hindsight wasn't the best outcome. 

You Were Never Really Here stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man hired to track down a kidnapped senator's daughter and dispenses a brutish, bloody brand of justice to the kidnappers.    I may have made the film sound more exciting than it is.    Even at ninety minutes, it moves at a snail's pace. 
Phoenix is unkempt, with stringy long hair and an untamed beard.    I wanted him to find the nearest barber more than I wanted him to find the girl.    Joe (just Joe) is a man who isn't just tormented by his past, but Tormented.    He relives past traumas and abuses over and over in his mind.   At some points, he does so with a plastic bag over his head; keeping it there until near suffocation.

His weapons of choice in his missions are duct tape and a hammer and he wields the hammer expertly, but thankfully he only encounters one person at a time to beat down with it.    When he is not hammering the skulls of bad guys, he is taking care of his frail, elderly mother (Judith Roberts) in his Brooklyn home.    Joe is a man consumed with his demons, which weigh him (and the movie) down.    Phoenix is all intensity, but not much else.    He is trapped within the boundaries of his anguish, so much so that in certain scenes he is barely able to raise his voice to the level of audible speech.   

After Joe rescues the nearly mute kidnapped daughter who was used as a sex slave (Samsonov), more complications arise which means we will have to spend more time with Joe and his sad, depressing world.    Ugh.   You Were Never Really Here never achieves liftoff.   In fact, it doesn't budge from the ground, like me trying to do a clean and jerk of 400 pounds.    It has a lot of angst, but not emotion.    There is action and activity, but the film is lifeless anyway.    The film returns often to Joe's past, giving us glimpses of the horrors he experienced, but this is mostly distracting.    One or two of these flashbacks would have sufficed.    We get the point.   Not that it helps any.