While Vaughn Stein’s writing and directorial debut, Terminal, may eventually get lost in the shuffle of Margot Robbie’s filmic canon–as she might forever be relegated to being remembered for her interpretations as Tonya Harding and Harley Quinn–there is something to be said for a revenge story centered around an obsession with Lewis Carroll’s classic. And, because Robbie is so obviously adept at playing women who are slightly cuckoo, she renders the “we’re all mad here” lead character, Annie, with confident ease.
It all begins with the hyper-intense colors that punctuate the work of Baz Luhrmann and Nicholas Winding Refn as Annie, in a brunette shoulder-length wig, saunters beneath a neon cross to make her way to “confession,” of sorts, narrating, “There is a place like no other on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery and danger. Some say to survive it, you need to be as mad as a hatter, which luckily…I am.” It’s no lie, either, we soon come to find, as Annie proves to be even more arcane and nonsensical than the Caterpillar, or perhaps worse still, the Cheshire Cat. The sort of alternate universe outside of time and space that Annie sets the tone for with that initial voiceover would seem to very much be of the David Lynch realm–and not just because of the macabre Double R-esque twenty-four hour diner that Annie works in. Grudgingly serving up coffee to sad twats like Bill (Simon Pegg), an English teacher coming to terms with the fact that he’s dying of cancer, or Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons), two goons straight out of Guy Ritchie’s unrealized arsenal of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and Revolver characters. Gangsters by any other name–when that name isn’t goon–Annie has promised a certain “Mr. Franklin” to prove herself a cut above all the rest of the “interested parties” offering to perform his “liquidations” (again, the script reeks of the Ritchie gangster vernacular). At the confessional, she thusly declares, “I’ll make you a wager. These other interested parties, I’ll set them on one another like starving rats in a cage, and you can watch through the bars. Give me a fortnight. I’ll have them both dead at your feet. If I win, I get your work. All of it. If you win, you get to make me the interested party that’s dead.”
Intrigued–not just by her looks–Mr. Franklin agrees, and soon we’re back to non-brunette wigged Annie toiling away (i.e. standing idly at the counter) at the End of the Line Diner, where boring, cancerous Bill ambles in with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. And after sitting down, he finds his twee behavior called out by Annie when he mocks her for not giving him a discount on coffee upon telling her he’s just been mugged, sarcastically remarking, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” She returns, “Naughty? As in spank me gently, I’ve been a naughty girl?” Visibly uncomfortable, he denies, “No, not that kind of naughty.” She continues, “As in tie me to the bedposts because I’ve been so naughty?” Ever the “pompous prat,” he corrects, “I think that qualifies as the same kind of naughty.” Trying to make him see that she’s well-aware of what she’s doing, but also knowing that men in general can never, at their core, not write a woman off as a nitwit, she states, “I know. I just enjoy watching you fidget when I say ‘naughty.'” And Annie, truth be told, enjoys watching a lot of men fidget under her seductive thumb, including at the strip club where she moonlights, La Lapin Blanche (that’s The White Rabbit, in case you couldn’t pick up on yet another overpowering Alice in Wonderland reference), having lured Vince and Alfred there under certain pretenses involving Mr. Franklin.
And as we watch her manipulate situation after situation, person after person, it all goes back to a particular “off-handed” comment made during her exchange with Bill, during which he asks, “Did something happen to you as a child?” to which she even more cheekily replies, “Besides my mother dying in agony in a blazing inferno?” Ah yes, how amply a childhood trauma can drive us to fulfill particular, let’s call them, life goals. So while the overall “plot” of Terminal can be deemed thin, at best (who needs to bother with depth when the cinematography is this saturated with color?), it is the dialogue that helps to keep it sharply afloat, with Ritchie-inspired aphorisms at every turn in the form of razor’s edge English witticisms like, “‘Slight, retiring young gentleman seeks decisive, practical lady to draw him from his shell. Friendship and romance. Suburban residence.’ Translation: ‘Skinny pencil-dick seeks dominatrix for abuse and humiliation. Has own dungeon.’ World’s gone to shit, and all anyone can think about is their next dirty one down the docks.”
Then, for added (more literal) correlative measure, there is the similar name of Vaughn Stein to Matthew Vaughn–Guy Ritchie’s longtime producer before busting out on his own to direct more tough guy films of the Tarantino genealogy, e.g. Layer Cake. And though Stein does his best to adroitly interweave Alice in Wonderland into the essential narrative of the film, Margot Robbie might have done better to simply take over the Mia Wasikowska role in order to inspire Tim Burton to be ever so slightly darker in his Disney interpretation. Then again, everyone knows Hollywood would have deemed Robbie too “old” to play the part, as if we’ve still forgotten all those times Joan Crawford in her forties managed to play someone’s love interest.
The word terminal, of course, applies as the film’s title in two senses: one in that the trains that come and go in Clinton’s (Mike Meyers, looking increasingly rough and more like Dr. Evil than ever) world are centered around a terminal, and, in the other, that most scarring conditions in life–mainly emotional–are terminal (not to mention Bill’s cancer condition). Annie showcases that much by the end of it, as her motives for revenge become painfully clear to Mr. Franklin, who seems to represent more Wizard of Oz than any character from Carroll’s best known work, where daddy issues aren’t really firmly addressed enough to be a worthy correspondent piece for this film.
