I select Daddio, a new Amazon offering starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson. I can rent the movie for six bucks. How bad can it be?
Pretty bad as it turned out. First of all, the entire movie is set in a New York City cab. I kept waiting for Sean and Dakota to get out of the cab and do something interesting, but they never did.
Instead, Sean Penn’s character turns out to be a rustic Freudian psychoanalyst posing as a nosy cab driver. Dakota Johnson plays a stunningly beautiful computer programmer living in midtown Manhattan. As the tedious story unfolds, she reveals herself to be a troubled woman scarred by her dysfunctional childhood back in western Oklahoma. Dakota lost her Oklahoma twang but never shook the anguish of growing up without her father.
Throughout this excruciatingly long movie, Sean probes Dakota’s hidden anguish with his gritty cab driver’s intuition. By the end of the movie, Dakota realizes why she is in an abusive relationship with an older married man.
That’s the whole movie. Before renting this sad sack drama, consider that you are only on this earth for a brief period of time. Do you want to waste part of your precious life watching Sean Penn practice psychiatry without a license?
