It’s been a minute since we’ve seen Frankie Muniz of Malcom in the Middle fame on our screens. I’d say Renner is worthy of his talents, although he certainly elevates the material at times. The first foray into science fiction by established indie director Robert Rippberger, Renner isn’t quite up to Ex Machina levels, but it’s still an interesting bottle film focused on artificial intelligence and its capacity to change the landscape of our lives.
Muniz plays the titular Renner, a nerdy, shy computer wiz with a crush on Jamie (Violet Beane), the beautiful barista who lives in the apartment across the hall from his. Once the two of them finally establish a relationship, — it’s truly painful to watch him fumble around the question at first — he introduces her to Salenus (voice of Marcia Gay Harden), the work-in-progress A.I. life coach he’s invented. It’s pretty obvious from Renner’s mannerisms and interactions with both Salenus and Jamie early on that Salenus is a manifestation of his troubled relationship with his late mother, who clearly had obsessive-compulsive disorder and was passing it on to him. He can’t leave his apartment without meticulously over-grooming himself and making everything in the apartment symmetrical and/or perfectly clean. Salenus only enables this behavior by spouting statistics about germs and possible diseases.
When she first comes over for dinner, Jamie brings her brother/roommate Chad (Taylor Gray), who’s unbelievably rude. This puts a stopper in Renner’s pursuit of her, but only for so long. Despite Renner’s awkward style and clear dating inexperience, he and Jamie establish a nice rapport, and it’s only when she first interacts with Salenus that Renner realizes there’s something not quite right about the whole thing.
Where Renner stumbles is in its lack of storytelling polish around a certain twist. There are things which make it very predictable despite its command of cinematic form on a low budget. However, once that hump is overcome, the final act is just as interesting as anything that came before, just in a slightly different way. This is a film which isn’t afraid to go as big as possible inside its small scale. Sean Emer’s cinematography highlights Renner’s mania exceptionally well, and even compliments his sweet side with surprising camera moves we rarely see in even mega-budget movies.
Muniz really is terrific here, and so is Beane. They have a solid chemistry somewhere past smoldering, but well before swooning. That fits the tone of the film perfectly, because the romantic angle shouldn’t take us too far away from the thriller element here. As Renner spirals downward mentally because of a certain plot development, Muniz gets a lot of different tones to play with, and, for as solidly made as it is, he ends up carrying the film to its conclusion. It’s a swift 90 minutes, but Muniz and Beane really make an impression in that time.
As I said, Renner isn’t a perfect film, and there are certainly better sci-fi explorations of artificial intelligence as a phenomenon. For an indie thriller using A.I. as a jumping-off point for some interesting character work, however, Renner does a lot of things very well, even if it isn’t as spotless as its title character’s apartment. | George Napper
