Russian Doll

Without the otherworldly, pseudo-Irish accent he employed in The Matrix, Hugo Weaving comes across as an astonishing approximation of Sam Neill. Neill, however, generally chooses to be in better movies than this one. The setup is promising enough: Boozy Aussie private investigator Harvey (Weaving) is devastated when he finds first that the love of his life is sleeping with one of his clients, and second, that another one of his clients has gone nuts and killed an adulterous spouse. Meanwhile, a Russian immigrant named Katia (Natalia Novikova) has journeyed all the way to Australia to meet her online lover, only to find him dead. So she promptly falls for Harvey's best friend, the "happily married" Ethan (David Wenham). If you think the opening acts of violence might pay off later, you're wrong: All sense of danger quickly vanishes as the film becomes an idiotic romantic comedy. Ethan bribes Harvey into marrying Katia so she can stay in the country, and she moves in to Harvey's small apartment. Their weird habits get on each other's nerves, so the rest is of course inevitable. The title supposedly refers to the fact that people are different inside than they seem on the outside (like the endless dolls inside dolls), but if you peel away the surface of this movie, one is left with not much at all. Weaving deserves much better; for his sake, one hopes he made this before The Matrix, and has subsequently been offered better films.