Wander is a wired-for-weirdness thriller

Wander Updates For a traffic wreck on a dusty highway, Wander opens up. A young lady, wounded and struggling, stumbles out of the broken car, and then she collapses to the ground when a bullet flies at her.

In 2016, Canadian director April Mullen made Below Her Lips, a film about lesbian desire that had audiences booing her all the way to the wink, a superficial shocker.

Wander opened up to even better reviews. Although I can’t decide what’s worse: Below Her Mouth’s pseudo-sophisticated sleaziness or this thriller’s black pretensions about an undercover investigator who is much more dysfunctional than this wobbly film will ever.

For a traffic wreck on a dusty highway, Wander opens up.

Why stage an intricate traffic crash only to be shot down by the survivor? This kind of double shock is in line with a film’s baggy character who doesn’t seem to know the mind, whether we can go with the unreliable mind in the washed-out town of Wander or don’t mind the mind-numbing funny business.

We’re the losers either way. Like a global warning, the film piles on the cryptic atmosphere. Yet all at the end looks like a hurricane in a teacup.

Aaron Eckhart, the extremely skilled Australian actor, is cast as the psycho-skidding Arthur. Invited to investigate the murder that opens the film, Aaron soon finds himself unable to say the truth by imagination.

Is what Arthur sees and hears actually going on? Who the heck cares! Ever after he lost his daughter in a crash, we’re told he has been this way. The previous tragedy and the present situation appear to be yoked at the hips now in his muddled mind, like two Siamese who cannot see eye-to-eye.

Conspiratorial whispering and incriminating gunshots flood the narrative. Yet little is as it seems. When we are pulled into a government conspiracy to plant chips into human beings, the staggering edifice falls down.

For his own good, it’s all too ambitious. And it is tragic to see Aaron Eckhart trying to make sense of the troubled mind of his character.

It’s much sadder to see the very talented Tommy Lee Jones, once part of some of the most important films in America, now portraying what seems to be the glorified sidekick of Eckhart.

Heather Graham for Urban Cowboy is still remembered by those of us. Here she is just a puppet on a G-string, swinging in search of a life beyond stifled screaming from scene to scene.