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,…
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