Shia LaBeouf's Marty Supreme

I saw Marty Supreme, which I never thought I would watch because we are currently at peak Timothée Chalamet, but I didn’t expect a performance like this. I don’t think anyone was. I can say this without exaggeration, this is the best movie ever made where Chalamet is playing Shia LaBeouf playing Sam Witwicky from the first Transformers movie. It was so good that I actually think Michael Bay directed it.

The editing had that same slapdash, nonsensical rhythm of Bay’s 2007 debut. Think back. Relax. Close your eyes, but keep them open just enough to read this. Meditate. Warp yourself back nearly twenty years to the opening night of nostalgia-bait filmmaking at its finest. Use a portal. Portals are super popular these days. Just think of one scene. Sam Witwicky, played by Shia LaBeouf, is looking for his grandpa’s glasses, I think? He’s accompanied by a beautiful woman who has lost the ability to emote and apparently had big toes for thumbs. It’s all a jumble. The scene is a jumble because while Sam is sneaking around his own house, the Transformers are outside, and because this is a Michael Bay thing, robots can’t just stand still. They are constantly moving and crushing the lawn. Sam’s parents think there is an earthquake, and his father, played by the adorable Kevin Dunn, takes his wine and hides under the dining table.

That family is loaded, by the way. Their house is massive and they only have the one kid. Julie White plays Sam’s mom, and Don and Judy Witwicky are really the highlight of that movie. They have a comic easiness that lends itself to their character-actor charisma. I’d like to see a movie of them just overreacting to subtle things. How would they react to a lost gas cap? What would they do if they left a Chili’s but forgot to pay? What kind of pornography does Don watch when Judy accidentally walks in while he's working his throbbing kong?

The inner lives of Sam’s parents, even in their limited capacity, are more interesting than Marty Supreme.

The entirety of this movie is Sam Witwicky sneaking around in his own home while robots stumble outside. Chalamet’s cadence is pure Sam Witwicky. So much nervous energy. But I shouldn't limit him; he’s Shia in any Shia role. Maybe that’s how Shia is in real life. I feel bad for him because he’s apparently afraid of gays, which is amazingly fun, the idea that someone would be afraid of us. Or he's just homophobic and "I'm afraid of gays" is just woo woo millennial Gay Panic bullshit. But Chalamet could be LaBeouf in Disturbia... or Holes? I can think of exactly three Shia roles and one of them is the seventeen Transformers movies he did with Bay.

I know Chalamet can act. I watched Interstellar recently, one of his first roles, and he was a fucking prick in that. Then he grew into Casey Affleck, who was also a fucking prick. He was in Dune as Paul Atreides, and those were amazing movies, but not because of Chalamet to be honest. I still like David Lynch’s version better because it had that warped, psychedelic, perverted quality found in Frank Herbert’s novel. The special effects in these new Denis Villeneuve films are great and Stellan Skarsgård is a terrific Baron Harkonnen, but I keep losing my train of thought. But Chalamet played Atreides as a fucking prick!

I haven’t played ping pong since I visited my Aunt and Uncle in 1986. Here it’s called table tennis and taken seriously by the people who play it but no one else. One of those Shark Tank guys is in this, and he can’t act worth shit, but he does get an exploitative and kinky scene where he makes Chalamet-as-Marty-as-Shia-as-Sam drop his pants and he spanks Chalamet-as-Marty-as-Shia-as-Sam with a paddle in front of his rich friends. The Shark Tank dude has a handsome face, but he’s rail thin, so the scene doesn't carry the same gravity as if they had cast an actual actor instead of this donkey-brained yahoo.

My point is, I’m glad Michael B. Jordan won an Oscar for Sinners. It’s a superior performance and a superior movie. Marty Supreme is just shenanigans from start to finish, and Marty lies so easily you’d think he was Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker from The Amazing Spider-Man. Have you ever noticed how that version of Peter Parker just lies all the time? There’s one scene where he claims credit for creating his webbing when we know he stole it from OsCorp. I love Andrew Garfield, but I wouldn't trust that version of Peter Parker with my mythical daughter Gwen Stacy.

Deep breaths.

I haven’t read this anywhere, but I feel like Chalamet just mainlined Shia LaBeouf movies as if he’d crushed up the VHS tapes into a powder and snorted them. His voice, his nervous energy, even the timbre. In this day of people being up in arms about AI theft, you’d think people would be more upset that Chalamet just up and stole a whole performance from Shia. If Brando were still alive, I think he’d have cause to sue Tom Hardy for his time in Mad Max: Fury Road, which was fine there because Hardy apparently had no idea what was going on and the movie was really a Furiosa film anyway. Max was a literal prop for Furiosa and I loved it.

Let's wrap this up. If you really want to see a movie about basically nothing with an actor playing another actor from a specific moment in a Michael Bay movie, go see Marty Supreme, one of Bay's few forays into character study.

I guess.