‘The Paperboy” can’t decide whether to be an unfunny sex comedy, a half-hearted detective story or a woeful race drama — so it decides to be all three, then becomes yet another movie (a swampy “Heart of Darkness”) in the final act.
The only conceivable reason for the existence of this embarrassing waste of celluloid is the touching fondness non-Southern actors have for trotting out their redneck accents. They’re as proud as kids in their prom dresses.
The title character (Zac Efron), who was kicked out of college, returns home to small-town 1969 Florida to hang around with his journalist brother (a scarred and greasy Matthew McConaughey), who along with a partner (David Oyelowo) seems to have been given unlimited time by his newspaper to try to free a revolting and racist death-row prisoner (John Cusack, looking like the floor of a roadside men’s room). The inmate has forged an epistolary romance, if you want to call it that, with a local slattern (Nicole Kidman, mummified in tight dresses and staggering beneath the weight of her false eyelashes) who obligingly gives pleasure to herself for his hungry eyes, and ours, on a prison visit.
There is yet worse in store for Kidman, who illustrates the alarming tendency of even the most elegant actresses to degrade themselves when they get a whiff of a potential Oscar. (Director Lee Daniels also did “Precious. ”) If this film is to be remembered at all, it will be known as the one in which Kidman pees on Efron’s thorax to cure his jellyfish sting, crying, “If anyone’s gonna piss on him it’s gonna be me.” Excuse me, I need to go take a shower now.
That jellyfish scene perfectly encapsulates the movie’s meaningless mood clatter — in about three minutes it goes from bantering and naughty to deadly serious and dreamy and then turns into outright camp. Daniels flirted with camp in the overwrought “Precious” and now, it appears, he wants to marry it.
The only real unifying element of this bizarre junk pile of mismatched themes, intentionally grubby cinematography and random spasms of violence is this: Every couple of scenes Efron must be seen in his undies or swim trunks. I lost count after half a dozen or so instances. At one point Daniels, on a thin pretext, has Efron strip down to his tighty whities and dance in the rain. Meanwhile, the main detective story the journalists investigate comes up so haphazardly, with a new clue seeping into the background every 20 minutes, that you may not even notice when it gets resolved.