Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

First and foremost: what a dark, unappetizing movie.
After watching it, I can only assume director Martin McDonaugh developed it from some incredibly horrifying place in his past.

Set in the fictional town of Ebbing, Missouri, which presumably sits somewhere in or near the Ozark Mountains, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) is a depressing story of loss with no concept of repentance and almost entirely filled with distasteful character development.

The story takes place some nine months after teenager Angela Hayes is raped and burned to death.
Her mother, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), is understandably distraught at this loss and even more upset that the police department hasn’t caught the perpetrator, so she pays for three billboards outside of Ebbing that collectively write out a sentence asking the police (specifically the police chief) why they’ve failed.

The music was interesting, but nice. It’s weirdly eclectic and doesn’t fit with the theme or setting of the film in any way, but I did like the ‘Showdown at the OK Corral’-type piece they played a few times.

James (Peter Dinklage) was the closest thing this movie had to a silver lining, and the director absolutely wasted him. He spends the entire time fawning over Mildred, despite the fact that she displays absolutely zero positive social qualities. Mid-life Frances McDormand made for the perfect image of “harangued, exhausted small-town woman,” but her character can’t rely on looks to balance out her awful behavior, so it’s never clear why James wants to spend any amount of time around Mildred.

Other than that, there was nothing good in this movie. I wanted to like it; I really did. I saw the high reviews on other sites, I remember there being some decent hype about it when it came out. Something along the lines of ‘mother loses her child, does everything in her power to right the wrongs,’ which can be outstanding if done right.
Instead, it was just a movie about human weakness and gross hatred and violence.

Mildred’s billboards call out the police chief by name, as he’s the chief of the small-down department, who it turns out is dying of cancer. The whole town knows about this and thinks Mildred’s giant signs are in bad taste, which is understandable, but it’s also easy to see why Mildred doesn’t have them taken down.
But it goes beyond that. Mildred wasn’t just upset about the loss of her daughter and the cops’ inability to solve the crime: she went mad with grief. Her behaviors are nothing short of psychopathic but played as if we’re supposed to 100% be on board with everything she’s doing.
For example: her dentist, who doesn’t agree with the billboards and says as much, is about to drill into a tooth without applying Novocain; she complains, he injects some into her gums, but doesn’t wait long enough before trying to start drilling. Mildred grabs his hand and pushes the drill bit through his thumbnail. Not really a behavior I can get behind.

The world-building was very strange in this movie. Everyone who wasn’t a main character just perpetually word-vomited until the camera switched away from them. It was funny once, when it was a teenager doing it, because that’s a trope everyone can happily get behind. It’s a lot less funny when it’s the entirety of the supporting cast.
Meanwhile, the town itself was a little bit too perfect. I lived in a town in Missouri for 2.5 years, and I traveled through many others. There are plenty of cute towns, but “Ebbing” was a facsimile of Americana: It was too clean. Too flawless. Too “small town America.”
It would have been more realistic if Mickey Mouse popped out and led a parade of characters down Main Street.

Mildred’s ex-husband is physically abusive, going as far as flipping a table and threatening to choke her out in a scene, years after they’d separated. He’s now dating a barely-legal teen girl. It’s played as ‘cutesy,’ but has horrifying implications for what is going to happen to that poor girl behind closed doors, if it hadn’t already happened.
This is made even more unfortunate by the fact that the girl’s few scenes make her out to be quite sweet, if somewhat dim.

Police Chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) is married to Anne (Abbie Cornish), and they don’t make a particularly cute couple. Harrelson’s history of comedic roles made it very hard to take him seriously for anything he did on screen, and Cornish cannot keep a single accent to save her life. I’m pretty sure she’s Australian, and her native accent was painfully obvious throughout the film, made worse when a random selection of words were jarringly twanged with a southern drawl. It was incredibly off-putting and pulled me out of every scene she was in.

This movie was clearly designed to show the “real” side of American life. Not Hollywood’s version of America, but the “real” version. Specifically, the “poor people live like this!” version, like the American lower class is some kind of zoo exhibit to be gawked at.
There was an uncomfortable amount of violence - most of it just people beating each other up - and always accompanied by blood. Then there was the cursing. I don’t have an issue with curse words, nor do I particularly care if people use them around me, but the script had an unreasonable repetition of “n*gger” and “c*nt,” seemingly for no other reason than shock value.
It was a little too colloquial for my delicate sensibilities, and graphic violence was there for the sake of violence, not to add anything or fit thematically.

Dixon (Sam Rockwell) spends the whole film being a disgusting man-child/power-tripping junior police officer who goes out of his way to be absolutely horrible to people. By chance, he overhears a man at a bar talking about raping a girl and lighting her on fire. This obviously sounds like the case of Angela Hayes, but it wasn’t: turns out guy at the bar was in the military and was happily bragging about committing war crimes while deployed. Surprise!

Dixon managed to get the guy’s license plate number and figure out where he lived. He passes that information along to Mildred, and the two of them decide to go kill the guy, based on nothing more than possibly-drunken bragging heard by a clearly drunken Dixon.
Which... what?!
I get it: Angela Hayes was raped and killed, and this soldier apparently did the same thing to someone else, but taking him out doesn’t solve the case.
More importantly: it’s just gross vigilantism. There’s a reason it’s illegal to take the law into your own hands. Especially in this scenario, as Dixon was never a reliable character, so why start trusting him now?
It was clearly supposed to be Dixon’s redemption and Mildred’s closure, but neither was earned.
This was compounded by the fact that the guy who did the bragging fit all of the puzzle pieces the movie had set up, including checking the boxes for two completely separate ‘Chekov’s Gun’ tropes.
It very much felt like the director had one idea in mind while making the movie, then watched the finished cut and demanded the end be re-shot without changing the necessary buildup.

There were a couple scenes where I was expecting Mildred to go full mama-bear on someone and lay down a righteous ass-kicking. Instead, she just stared people down until the script distracted her or she went off to do something terrible.

Up until about the halfway point, I was ready to give this film 3 Claws - it wasn’t horrible, and I was expecting things to turn around, maybe find some lesson about learning to live with pain and grow stronger for it.
Then it got down to 2 Claws when I realized that Mildred had clearly gone straight-up crazy.
Ultimately, this is a 1 Claw movie. It’s like the director was actively trying to kill any good-will this movie had the longer it went.
There’s nothing positive here: no takeaway, no decent conclusion, no mystery or intrigue.
None of the characters in this movie were good. No one made a good choice, no one ended the film happier than when it started. They never even caught the rapist.

My wife once commented to me “but you like sad endings.”
Which is true, when they fit thematically.
This wasn’t a sad ending though - this was just a bad movie with a worse ending.
If you want an earned sad ending, go watch “Legends of the Fall” or “3:10 to Yuma.”
I’d even recommend “Peppermint” (2018) over this, and I didn’t like that one either.