'The Greatest Hits' Mistakes Mawkish Sentimentality For Profundity

By Petr Navovy | Film | April 22, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | April 22, 2024 |

Music is the closest thing we have to magic in this world. It can console you, amp you up, bring tears to your eyes. It crosses lines of culture, race, and history. Some might say that with its ability to connect people so intimately with works of art created decades or even centuries ago, music has the ability to…drumroll…make you time travel. The new romantic fantasy film, The Greatest Hits, takes this bit of wistful imagery and treats it literally, following a young woman who has lost her partner to a car accident and who has discovered she can travel back to key moments in her and her partner’s shared history when those songs were playing. Naturally, she uses this power to try to prevent him from dying, but as we join the story, she seems no closer to realising this goal, as the past seems stubbornly set on playing out the same way over and over again. Will she succeed in her goal, or realise that the best way to deal with her feelings is to let the past go?

As someone for whom music is an integral part of my own life as well as the life I share with my partner, I was primed to connect with a story like the one being told in The Greatest Hits. With a premise like that, it wouldn’t have to do much at all to resonate with me. Unfortunately, the film—while serviceably acted—lacks any sense of fun or inspiration, refusing or unable to expand on its premise in a way that would justify being a feature film rather than a ten or fifteen-minute short. Lifeless set designs straight out of an IKEA advert are the order of the day, and that artifice is mirrored in the storytelling, which mistakes extended close-ups peppered with lens flare and pained expressions for profundity. Yes, it’s a story about grief, but so diluted by mawkish sentimentality that it forgets to do much of anything else other than mope and stick on some (fairly uninspired) records.

I wish I had more to say about The Greatest Hits! It’s still a piece of work that someone put time into, and many people collaborated on, and it’s not evil—it’s just very, very bland. Unfortunately, a bland film often makes for a bland review, so why don’t we have some fun here at the end just to close on a bouncy note?

The Greatest Hits wanted to be an ‘Appetite For Destruction’. It ended up being more like ‘The Spaghetti Incident?’

The Greatest Hits is the cinematic equivalent of the band Keane.

The Greatest Hits? More like, ‘The unreleased B-sides from the keyboard player’s experimental side project’.