‘Poolman’ Review: Chris Pine’s Daffy Absurdist Disaster of an L.A. Noir

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic I’m a fan of Chris Pine: the early Shatner-smooth charisma, the powerful chops he’s displayed in movies like “Hell or High Water,” the authoritative snap of his performance as the cult-leader heavy in “Don’t Worry Darling.” So I take no vicious pleasure in saying that “Poolman,” a movie that Pine co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is not only the worst film I saw during the fall festival season but would likely be one of the worst films in any year it came out.

Okay, maybe I’m taking a bit of vicious pleasure in saying that, since I had to sit through the goddamn thing. At the Toronto Film Festival showing I attended, there were a lot of walkouts. “Poolman,” to the extent that you can discern the ragged crayon scrawl of a design in it, wants to be one of those daffy, rambling, sick-soul-of-Los-Angeles detective noir comedies, like “The Long Goodbye” or “Under the Silver Lake.” Pine, with scraggly hippie hair and a graying beard, padding around in salmon-colored swim trunks and cool shades, plays Darren Barrenman (check the existential last name!), a swimming-pool attendant who lives in a Tiki shack next to a dilapidated L.A.

apartment complex. His job consists of taking care of the apartment pool — no other pools in the city, just that one! He’s an eccentric lazybones who speaks in wispy stoned wannabe epigrams, so the idea seems to be that he’s playing some variation on the Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” But the Dude was fun, the Dude had a sharp tongue, the Dude abided.

Darren just irritates. Early on, he sits down at the small manual typewriter in his shack and dashes off one of the civic-minded crank letters he regularly writes to Erin Brockovich, whose photograph hangs on his wall.