Capsule Review: Manodrome (2023)
Manodrome could have been a contender. A contender that would fall in the same vein as Taxi Driver since Jesse Eisenberg’s Ralphie shared the same character traits, if not all, of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Both are emotionally unstable men full of hatred as well as bottled-up anger and frustration waiting to explode. But whereas Bickle is an insomniac Vietnam vet driving a taxi in the mean streets of New York City, Ralphie is a ride-share driver struggling to make ends meet.
We learn that Ralphie has been laid off from his steady job and if that’s not enough, his girlfriend, Sal (Odessa Young) is currently pregnant with their kid. He’s going to be a dad soon and that means there will be more expenses in the future. Instead of doing something more practical to solve his financial woes, he spends time hitting the gym and lifting weights. Bodybuilding seems like a thing he can achieve what he wants without a setback. At one point, we see him admiring his own muscled body in front of the mirror in the locker room while repeatedly taking selfies.
Ralphie is also addicted to Percocet, which he gets from his friend Jason (Philip Ettinger). Jason also introduced him to Dan (Adrien Brody), who leads an all-male, cult-like group dedicated to helping men like Ralphie.
Jesse Eisenberg, looking all bulked-up with suppressed emotions and his committed performance is the main reason that keeps me watching the movie. He is also backed by solid supporting turns played by the charismatic Adrien Brody, channelling a dash of Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and Odessa Young. Interestingly, the latter is originally played by Riley Keough but she chose to remain as one of the producers. She does, however, appear in a brief but memorable cameo in the movie. Keough’s replacement, Young, does a good job playing a frustrating pregnant girlfriend who has to deal with Ralphie’s lack of two-way communication.
However, good acting alone can’t mask the inadequacy of solid execution in the movie’s otherwise promising premise. I’m almost convinced that Manodrome would be a modern-day Taxi Driver-like masterpiece for today’s generation. The problem is, it looks to me as if writer-director John Trengrove chose to hold back the story’s pessimistic nature of his storyline as much as possible to mirror Ralphie’s conflicted anger-related issues.
As a result, it feels like a missed opportunity and by the time Ralphie did reach the breaking point, Manodrome ends up more of a Taxi Driver lite than fully embraced its premise. It’s a pity because this is one of Eisenberg’s best performances I’ve ever seen in a long while, showcasing his impressively nuanced acting prowess without overdoing it. His performance is undoubtedly more in line with the actor’s best-of-list, namely his Oscar-nominated turn in The Social Network than the embarrassingly bad and miscasting role as Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Eisenberg as well as some of the cast including Brody and Young deserve better than what we get here.
