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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Prince Avalanche

PRINCE AVALANCHE (David Gordon Green). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (August 23). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NN


Prince Avalanche is being hailed as a return to form for David Gordon Green, as the director of George Washington and All The Real Girls gets back to his small-scale indie roots after a string of studio jobs like Pineapple Express, Your Highness and The Sitter.

I guess that’s true enough. Prince Avalanche is definitely a small movie, though this small movie happens to star Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch. But the more time I spent with it, the more Prince Avalanche felt like Green’s attempt to rebuild his credibility without making much of an effort.

Relocating the Icelandic drama Either Way to 1988 Texas, the movie casts Rudd and Hirsch as a couple of road workers squabbling their way through a summer of painting lines on rural streets. It’s just an empty cycle of resentment and posturing, with the balance shifting back and forth until someone calls the other a name or throws a punch.

It might make for an interesting stage play, but it’s barely a movie the actors are good enough to hold the screen through endless existential arguments while they poke along the road, but Green never make those conversations compelling.

Prince Avalanche may look and sound like an art film, but it isn’t much of anything, really.

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