HARK!
I hear...a 'daddy director'...
Though it has a few pretty good scenes, Sean Penn's Flag Day hardly lives up to the riveting introductory scene, which suggests Penn is shooting for Terrence Malik--who directed him, in the 1998 war meditation The Thin Red Line and the extraordinary (if indulgent) 2011 family exploration Tree of Life--territory.
Unfortunately, much of Penn’s movie is more mallet than Malik.
In the summer of 2021, Flag Day was released in theaters...and was a dud. Now, with the actual holiday Flag Day approaching on June 14, the movie is being pushed by streamers.
After a decent first half-hour, Flag Day is reduced to tatters, flying at half-mast at best. As a director, Penn seems to let his actors--including himself, daughter Dylan Penn and son Hopper Penn--improvise scenes and do whatever they want; nice for rehearsals, but…
Getty Images photos of daughter Dylan Penn and dad Sean Penn, at a press event for Flay Day.
Hopper, who looks like James Dean's grandson, has just a few scenes. The movie belongs to dad-and-daughter. As a director, Sean Penn has been much better, notably with the minimalist survival exploration Into the Wild. As an actor, he has had an up-and-down career: at best he's electrifying, at worst not an actor but a corny overactor. The latter, here, as his idea of defining a character seems to be smoking and pacing. Too bad, as the scheming father could have been fertile territory, especially as he developed into an expert counterfeiter; but the movie bizarrely glazes over his fake-money making, which sounds like the most interesting part of the story (The movie is based on a true story, from the book Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father's Counterfeit Life by Jennifer Vogel.)
Many of the scenes between the honesty-challenged father and pleading-for-attention daughter have an actors' workshop feel; the director allows undisciplined, meandering, wordy-but-not-saying-much scenes.
He clearly didn't pay attention to Malik, who often allows silence to speak loudly.
Katheryn Winnick is pretty good, as Penn's wife; the movie could have used more of her scenes. Ditto for Josh Brolin, who just pops in for a couple of scenes and then (presumably) runs for cover.
Flag Day is streaming, so to speak, on Prime Video, the Roku Channel, EPIX NOW, Spectrum TV, EPIX, ROW8, VUDU, Vudu Movie & TV Store, Redbox and Apple TV.