A film director encounters a Spanish cobbler who thinks he's Don Quixote come to life, and together they embark on a very bizarre adventure.
COMEDY
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The Man Who
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The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is perhaps more famous for its 25 year journey to the screen than for what the film actually ended up being. Two decades of production problems, rights disputes, and just plain bad luck set this film back for Terry Gilliam countless times until it was finally made in 2018. The finished product is, frankly, not worth the wait. It's a bit of a mess, with so many separate plot threads involving the main character Toby (Adam Driver) as he accompanies Javier (Jonathan Pryce), the Spanish cobbler who thinks he is Don Quixote.
Toby is filming a commercial in Spain and inspiration hits when he discovers a DVD of an old film he made about Don Quixote. He tracks down the cobbler he hired for the film, only to find that Javier thinks he actually is Don Quixote, and Toby gets swept up in an adventure that blurs the line between fantasy and reality, so much so that the audience gets lost almost frequently. There are times where this feels like two or three separate films squeezed into one overly long, overly ambitious desert trek. The biggest issue with this film is that it doesn't live up to the decades of hype and urban legend surrounding it. It's a fairly average Gilliam adventure that isn't as memorable as Brazil or as fantastical as The Brothers Grimm. It sports two great lead performances in Driver and Pryce, but the story is hard to follow and, at times, hard to invest in. There are entire scenes that could've easily been cut, particularly the scene with the shiny knight that serves no purpose whatsoever. I must confess myself quite disappointed. |