Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
At the turning point of the Iran-Contra affair, Elena McMahon, a fearless investigative journalist covering the 1984 US presidential campaign, puts herself in danger when she abandons her assigned task in order to fulfill the last wish of her ailing father, a mysterious man whose past activities she barely knows.
The Last Thing He Wanted had promising source material in Joan Didion's novel and a strong cast, but the adaptation is widely regarded as a near-incoherent mess. The plot, adapted from Didion's deliberately elliptical prose, translates poorly to screen—chronology is jumbled, motivations are opaque, and the political thriller mechanics never generate tension. Acting from Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck is stiff and misaligned with the material, suggesting directorial or editing failures. The cinematography has some atmospheric qualities befitting a period political thriller. The Iran-Contra backdrop and Didion source material give it some novelty, but the execution squanders the distinctive premise. The ending is particularly unsatisfying, arriving abruptly without earned emotional or narrative resolution, leaving most viewers baffled.