Drama thriller

Serenity (M18)

106 minutes/Now showing (Feb 21)/1 star

The story: On a tropical island, Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is a fisherman obsessed with hooking a giant tuna he has named Justice. Local businesswoman Constance (Diane Lane) is a benefactress, gives him money when he runs short. One day, his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) shows up with a plan that will make him rich.

Sultry. Everything is sultry here.

McConaughey's glare is sultry, so is Lane's stare. Hathaway oozes sultry when she walks.

The village bar, the boats, the fish market - all sultry. The sweat on everyone's brow screams sultry.

This is a tragic example of a film that stinks in the first half, then spends the second half explaining that the first half was bad on purpose, but using a rationale so preposterous that it makes the second half worse than the first.

McConaughey is in every shot - or rather, his sultriness is.

He takes a nude swim in one scene, allowing a good view of his ego and lack of judgment. His assets are on fuller display here than when he was in the male stripper comedy Magic Mike (2012).

Making everything feel stranger and more soft porn-like are his liaisons with Lane, who plays Constance, Dill's sugar mummy.

Rather than shoot their scenes as a straightforward sex-for-money exchange, which would have been honest and interesting, it is viewed through dreamy, romance-novel gauze. Their post-coital chats, wreathed in cigarette smoke, are, yes, languorous and sultry.

All this steaminess is an appetiser for the main course, which is Hathaway's Karen, who does a bit of Hat Acting, when her eyes flash from under a brim.

She appears to be doing an impersonation of a noir thriller vamp for laughs. But she is deadly serious and, later, there is an explanation for the Jessica Rabbit impression.

Anyway, cue the furious coupling, which, if this were a true noir, would be sensual. But for reasons that are made clear later, the event is about as sexy as a visit to a government polyclinic.

British writer-director Steven Knight has an Oscar nomination for writing Dirty Pretty Things (2002), a socially conscious drama. He has a long career writing strong drama-thrillers that speak to current affairs (Eastern Promises, 2007; Redemption, 2013).

But he is fond of classic genres, which seem to turn out less well for him - see his lukewarm foray into espionage romance Allied (2016) or the tepid foodie heartwarmer The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014).

Serenity is Knight's stab at the tropical noir format, in the style of Body Heat (1981) or Blood Simple (1984), but the result, which applies a layer of gloopy sentimentality over a tale of greed and seduction set on a boat, is a slice of seafood best left on the plate.