I’m not the kind of person who enjoys sight-seeing. It’s really not my thing. I distinctly recall being about eleven or twelves years old, seeing the Grand Canyon in person, and thinking “Yeah, it looks like pictures of the Grand Canyon”.

I went on a vacation with an ex and her family to the Outer Banks area of North Carolina one year, and they spent an entire day driving around to see all of the lighthouses. That was torture as far as I was concerned, not enjoyable. And one day, my wife and I hiked up to an overlook, whereupon I was ready to turn around and go home because, really, you see one scenic overlook, you’ve seen them all. I know what trees on rolling hillsides look like. They aren’t that amazing, everyone.

Whatever it is, the part of my brain that is supposed to be configured to appreciate nature and the remarkable things contained within just never fully came into its own. Stuff to look at is stuff to look at, and I don’t have any desire to look at it for fifteen minutes when one minute shows me everything I need to see.

Take, for example, the Delicate Arch. I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s neat. Do I need or desire to see it in person? Not necessarily. I’m sure it looks just like it looks in pictures. It’s rocks!

Now a MOVIE called Delicate Arch? Well that’s as horse of a different color! Haven’t seen that before!

This Delicate Arch is a trippy quasi-horror picture about four friends escaping an “inversion”–some kind of natural phenomenon that makes the air bad–in Utah. While everyone else their age is fleeing to a lake to party away the event, four friends decide instead to head out to the desert near where the Delicate Arch resides.

As they make their escape, they begin questioning their own reality and their existence inside of it. And things only get weirder from there…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ The first act of Delicate Arch is very intriguing, and it brings up a lot of potential that the movie could be wild, out-there, and interesting. We open on a segment where a man is seemingly brainwashed by the narrator of the movie and then talked into killing himself. From there, we see a younger man in a car with an old timey camcorder recording the meeting of two others. So right away you’ve got some bizarre elements that are sure to pay off and a bit of intrigue between three of our core protagonists.

As our main characters drive into the desert, one of them–Grant, the driver of the trip–seems to start having breakdowns as he begins peeking through the fourth wall and appears to realize that he is in a film. So early on, we have a lot of great set-up with some truly engaging details.

+ The movie is made up almost entirely of four actors. William Leon as Grant, Kelley Mack as Wilda, Kevin Bohleber as Cody, and Rene Leech as Ferg. The four of them do a more than serviceable job in their roles, and they have a lot to act against. They have to portray regular folks with regular folk drama, but they also have to interact with the wilder elements of the film once those come into play. It’s a transition they all make pretty effortlessly, and I bought their experiences.

For my money, William Leon is the strongest of the four, but he’s also the central focal point and is the actor given the most to do. His interactions with Wilda and then with the movie itself are quite good, and Leon is clearly doing his level best.

– With such an exciting first act that contained so much promise, I was eager to see where the movie would take me. The second act is what was expected: the film calms down a bit and becomes about the four friends as they make their way to the titular structure. There is a zany, partially-anime-inspired mushrooms sequence, but aside from that, the film settles into a relatively normal story.

But to say the third act doesn’t really pay off the intrigue of the first would be an understatement. The movie gets weird again, but in a far less entertaining way. The Grant character is left on his own and continues to discover the cinematic elements of his life. Ferg wanders off and finds the broken down car that Cody and Wilda have left behind. She watches the old camcorder, and their fate is… kind of revealed. Basically things start going off the rails, but in the worst ways.

I’m not entirely sure what Delicate Arch was trying to say, and I don’t think that’s because I’m not smart enough to “get it”. It just felt like a bunch of things flung at the wall. Maybe it wasn’t trying to convey any message. Maybe it was just… stuff.

– The ending of Delicate Arch, which I obviously won’t spoil, is an even worse pay-off than the third act, as it invalidates so much of what came before it. It really did not work for me, as it felt so out of nowhere–even for this flick–and it stinks of a director/writer not knowing how to end his affair.

OVERALL

This wasn’t for me, and I really wanted it to be after the first act. But it comes across as though the movie forgot to have fun with himself. The elements in play should have led to a crazy, nutso film that broke the boundaries of what you thought you would see, but instead it just gets out there for the sake of being out there. And the ending… what was that? I appreciate the creative swing here, and I will REMEMBER this movie, which is better than the alternative! But it didn’t land as far as I was concerned.