It may be the only movie ever made in which it’s hard to follow a fistfight.
It may be the only movie ever made in which it’s hard to follow a fistfight. John David Washington, as an unnamed CIA agent, is facing off against an enemy combatant who is dressed in what looks like riot gear. As they pummel each other, we’re supposed to hone in on the fact that Washington’s character is moving forward in time while his antagonist is moving backward in time. But like so much else in this dazzlingly semi-illogical and cold-eyed poetic action thriller, it all plays out according to the Nolan head-scratching aesthetic: intriguing in theory, abstract and often baffling in execution. The film is reasonably intoxicating for the first 45 minutes, when Washington, exuding a brainy aura of danger, toys with Kenneth Branagh’s icepick-hearted Russian gangster baron by arranging things like a 747 smashing into an airport building that houses an airlocked vault full of priceless paintings. But by the last act of “Tenet,” a grandiose action battle full of explosions that run backward, you can see that the effects are cool, and the idea is cool, but how the logistics all actually fit together remains barely coherent. Which sort of limits the fun.