The Grand Budapest Hotel follows the tale of eccentric hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and a lobby boy he befriends whilst caught up in an investigation into the mysterious death of a loyal customer of the hotel he is employed by.
Now, I am very aware that I may be upsetting many people when I say that The Grand Budapest Hotel is possibly one of the worst films I have watched of late, especially after the critical acclaim it received. The only reason I watched it was due to the reviews I had read, saying that it did not require too much thought and was a tremendous bit of fun – as opposed to… removing your eyeballs with an ice cream scooper? Marginally, maybe. I had no idea what to expect when it came to sitting down and watching it, however, I did expect a hell of a lot more than what was actually delivered, so much so, that after 48 minutes of watching Ralph Fiennes parade around in a tailcoat with a lobby boy following like a lost sheep, I had lost the will to live, and I turned it off and went to bed, completely and utterly disappointed with what I had seen.
There was just nothing in it for me that made me want to keep watching. I’m not saying there are not people out there that will watch it and believe it to be the best film ever made, because obviously to have received so many positive reviews, it has clearly appealed to a wide audience. However, this is not an audience I am a member of. Maybe I just wasn’t of the intellectual capacity to see beyond what was actually put in front of me? All I saw for what I was able to endure was basically a one-man opera of a man describing the meaning of life in a way that was trying abominably hard to be funny, but just wasn’t.
After watching only 48 minutes of The Grand Budapest Hotel, I don’t feel that I can say an awful lot more about the sorry affair I found it to be. I will just finish by saying if you like films where things actually happen, probably give this a miss.
