Movie Review: The Rules Don't Apply

The last movie Warren Beatty has been in was Town and Country that came out in 2001 and was considered mostly a pretty average movie. The last movie that Warren Beatty wrote, starred in and directed was Bullworth and that movie came out in 1998 and was mostly considered a good movie. The new Warren Beatty movie "The Rules Don't Apply" was both written, starred in and directed by Warren Beatty and one has to wonder if this is the last movie he will ever make, given the long period of time between movies he has been involved in. While watching this film, I was wondering how long he took Beatty to write the screenplay for this movie? Could it have been most of the entire 15 years or perhaps in erratic spurts where he wrote and re-wrote the same script 50 or 100 times over the years, always looking for that perfect story or perfect ending? Unfortunately, from what I saw, it looked like this movie was written and re-written way too many times and the end result was a boring, disjointed, and mostly bad movie, with numerous Hollywood current and former stars, all probably friends of Beatty with the one bright spot being Lilly Collins who should have a very long career as a major actress in Hollywood.

This movie is mostly about two things. The strange and very depressing life of Howard Hughes whose very wealth and family fortune could have been his ultimate undoing and Hughes involvement with Hollywood, moviemaking and young women whom he promised Hollywood stardom only to later rudely ignore them, probably more because of his OCD problems and insanity than any other reason. These two story lines are not really related to each other especially considering that most of the non-Hollywood part of this movie had to do with Howard Hughes involvement with the Aviation Industry. This entire two-hour film flipped back and forth from the possible stardom of Marla Mabry played by Lilly Collins and Howard Hughes to his assistants and his problems with bank loans and the Aviation field. Mostly due to this constant story flipping and boring story I was looking at my watch, wondering when this pretty bad movie was finally going to end. It doesn't take a great deal of thought to wonder why this movie was made, but clearly in this case, it is because of Hollywood clout and the producer's belief in the "built in" fans of Warren Beatty would come out to see this movie regardless of the story or the quality. I was surprised how mostly bad and boring this movie was, considering all the people involved, but I guess what this proves in that 15 years of writing and re-writing one movie is probably more of a guarantee of a bad movie than a good one. The good things about this movie are Lilly Collins, who is the daughter of singer Phil Collins and has great future potential and great Hollywood looks and a few minor moments of humor. The bad things are many, starting with and most importantly how very boring this too long two-hour movie was.

The movie The Rules Don't Apply is just not worth seeing and I do not recommend it.