Deborah Ross

Bottom Gere

Richard Gere is flamboyantly terrible, hamming it up until someone must have had to run out for more ham

The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one. It’s one of those what-were-they-thinking projects that wastes decent talents — Richard Gere and Dakota Fanning, most notably — for no discernible purpose and has you thinking throughout that whatever they were paid it wasn’t enough, and even if they’d been offered more, that wouldn’t have been enough, and so on, until all the money that currently exists in the world had been offered. And it still wouldn’t have been enough.

The film is written and directed by Andrew Renzi and stars Gere as Francis Watts, aka Franny, a multi-billionaire philanthropist whose wealth is never explained and who builds hospitals for children. (Therefore we have to fundamentally like him? What if I refuse?) The film opens with a fatal accident, when Franny is in a car with his best friend Bobby (Dylan Baker) and Bobby’s wife, Mia (Cheryl Hines). He is in the back, high on a spliff, when he leans forward to hug Bobby, who is driving, and distracts him. Bobby hits an oncoming vehicle, which takes out him and his wife. ‘Hugs can kill’ no road safety sign has ever said, but perhaps they should.

Skip five years, and when we catch up with Franny, we find he is riddled with guilt, has mutated into Billy Connolly grooming-wise, and swigs morphine straight from the bottle. I believe we are being told he’s in pain. But then his friend’s daughter, Olivia (Fanning), whom he has always adored, gets in touch. His nickname for Olivia is ‘Poodles’, as in ‘is that you, Poodles?’ when he answers the phone, and it’s just so ultra-creepy that every time he said it, which he does about 280 times, I felt a little something in me die.

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