William Monahan’s bizarre thriller, “Mojave,” revolves around a disillusioned artist named Thomas (Garrett Hedlund), who leaves his cushy Hollywood lifestyle to go find himself in the Mojave Desert. He is out in the desert guzzling Vodka like it’s water.
One night, a mysterious stranger named Jim (Oscar Isaac, sounding like a cross between a young Clint Eastwood and an older Nick Nolte) walks into his camp and begins rambling about Jesus and “Moby Dick” in pseudo-philosophic sentences. Things don’t go well during their meeting, and before long, Jim stalks Thomas through the desert, which leads to Thomas killing an innocent person.
Eventually, Thomas returns to L.A. to try to resume his normal life, but Jim continues to follow him.
“Mojave” is a fairly simple and straightforward cat-and-mouse-style thriller; however, the picture is missing a core. As a character, Thomas is kind of a blank slate — an apathetic, mopey schlub. Hedlund looks tired and bored in the role, squinting his eyes half the time as if he can barely keep them open. We don’t get a sense of who Thomas was before his trip to the desert, nor do we come to understand why he’s feeling so disillusioned (and clearly suicidal) in the first place.
Meanwhile, Jim is simply a creepy drifter who’s jealous and resentful toward Thomas’ wealth and fame. Jim is so determined to follow Thomas, as though he has some clever scheme in taking Thomas down, and yet a lot of the time he is ill-prepared and comes off stupid. Two major confrontation sequences — one at a bar, and another in a trailer back in the desert — fizzle out due to Jim’s ineptitude. In other words, Jim is a lame antagonist.
And because th- two primary characters are so dull and one note, their rivalry (and in essence, the central force of the movie) is also dull.
On top of that, the stakes aren’t very high. When Jim comes to L.A to track down Thomas, there’s not much of a threat. Thomas has a wife and child, but it’s revealed early on that they’re in England, so they aren’t in any immediate danger. When Jim strikes up a creepy conversation with Thomas’ sometimes-girlfriend Milly (Louise Bourgoin), it has no effect because the audience has no sense of their relationship before the desert and there’s no follow-up. For the most part, the picture meanders along on autopilot, never becoming as tense and compelling as it should be.
Other secondary characters show up for a few scenes apiece, hardly making an impact. Mark Wahlberg (basically playing himself) is a fast-talking, irresponsible movie producer, and Walton Goggins is Thomas’ agent, who’s wide-eyed and talks like a creep for some reason. Pretty much all of the actors in “Mojave” have some kind of eccentric affectation, perhaps to mask the hollowness of their characters.
In the end “Mojave” is an intriguing but ultimately pointless endeavor. It has a mythical, almost otherworldly quality to it, but all that turns out to be window-dressing. The picture wants to be twisty and profound but is actually meandering and hollow.