The Weight Wasn’t Worth the Wait

There’s quite a bit about The Weight that I liked.

The acting is good across the board. It’s beautifully shot at times, with some genuinely impressive scenery, and the whole production has a polished, expensive feel to it. This isn’t one of those movies where you can immediately point at something and say, “Well, there’s the problem.”

The problem is that I never really cared what happened.

And I kept waiting to.

The Weight starts with a premise that already feels a little concocted, and the movie never quite convinced me otherwise. Instead of disappearing into the story, I was always somewhat aware of the machinery underneath it.

Movies are obviously constructed. We know that.

The good ones make you forget.

The Weight never did that for me.

At times, the movie seems to lean heavily on sound design to generate tension.

And somewhere along the way I started wondering whether this is becoming a modern movie tell.

When the story isn’t creating enough tension on its own, turn up the sound engineering and let the speakers do some of the work.

That’s probably unfair as a universal rule. Plenty of great movies have aggressive sound design. But here, I became unusually aware of it, and once I noticed it, it was difficult not to notice it again.

Ultimately, all that craftsmanship never managed to pull me into the story.

Which is a shame, because The Weight certainly isn’t a bad movie.

It looks good. It’s well acted. Ethan Hawke, in particular, is superb. There’s clearly talent behind the camera and in front of it.

But when it ended, that was pretty much it.

Sometimes a movie can do almost everything competently and still never quite come alive.

For me, that was The Weight.