Writer/director/actor David Zellner has put out the film Goliath that is about a down and out man who has lost everything. Guy (David Zellner) has just recently been divorced from his wife Abby (played by Caroline O’Connor) and since then his life has been going down the drain. While at work he is demoted to a position he don’t like being in, he finds out his neighborhood is not as good a place as it used to be, and to top it all off he has lost his cat Goliath.
Like I do with movies I get that I haven’t really seen much information about, I read the back of the case, this is what I did with Goliath. When I read that the movie was going to be “laugh-out-loud” I was expecting it to be a really good independent film. From the idea of the plot Goliath really does seem like it would be a good film. A man that is on the brink of going out of his mind while looking for his lost cat and having to deal with his new ex-wife.
Instead what the film Goliath ends up being is a slow, drawn out, and boring snippet of a guys life who does nothing. Other than the lead actor David Zellner, the rest of the characters that pop up in the movie on the few occasions there is no decent acting in the film. Those few characters, and I mean few, and they really do only appear through out the film on a few occasions, seem to be acting for the first time. There’s even one scene where the actor almost looks to be struggling to remember his lines and in doing so he just spits the lines out in a robotic manner.
As for the flow of the overall movie, well, it’s slow. I kept waiting for something to happen with this guy who has lost his wife and now his cat. At the end of the movie I was still waiting for something to happen but that was not going to happen. For a idea, Goliath has the possibilities to be a really good film and maybe for some people this movie was a great film but for me it fell short. There’s no action, there’s no tension, at no time did it feel like this man was really missing his cat because he loved it but only because that was his last connection to his old life, and at no time did I get any sense of drama. Even with the few scenes featuring his wife the drama and tension between them just seems flat and pushed. This is the same feeling that I get from the whole movie, that it was being pushed or forced rather than it flowing.