Tone-deaf Tuner

1 star

A kid from the wrong side of the tracks meets a kid from the other side. They bicker at each other, but they share a common love – dance, music, cooking, whatever. Right side is a professional. Wrong side is a raw talent unable to reach their potential because of poverty/physical limitations/not having the right shoes, instruments, or cookware. Their passion for their art finally brings them together and leads them to fall in love. There’s a honeymoon period, then complications, followed by a breakup or three. A happy ending is not guaranteed. 

When it works, like Grease or, a personal favorite, the 2006 Channing Tatum flick Step Up, films like this can be a lot of fun. Dumb fun, for sure, especially as you grow older. But fun nonetheless. When they don’t work, or when you can almost smell the desperation of the filmmakers as they try to cover the cliches that make up the film’s shaky foundation, it can be a grind to sit through.

Tuner is a grind. Director Daniel Roher, best known for documentaries like Blink and Navalny, certainly piles on layers to try to set his story apart from the others in the overstuffed genre. Still, the basic beats play out the same way. Here’s where they meet. Here’s where they argue. Here’s where they flirt, and here’s where they reluctantly have PG-13 sex in a movie rated R for language, violence, and drug use. The big twist of the flick is that the wrong side, as explained on the film’s IMDb.com page, is “a talented piano tuner who suffers from hyperacusis (click here) who discovers an unexpected aptitude for cracking safes, turning his life upside down.” And, yeah, it’s as clumsy in the film as it sounds. You get the feeling that Roher watched a lot of caper flicks preparing for Tune, because his quick cut visual interpretation of a safe being cracked, a true opportunity to lift the film above the rest, is unoriginal and uninspired. 

Up to this point, the film’s leads have been referred to as the “wrong side” and the “right side,” but that’s more than just movie-reviewer snark. Leo Woodall (wrong) and Havana Rose Liu (right) both deliver generic performances that make you wonder whether casting anyone else would have made the movie any better. To be fair, there isn’t an actor alive who could say a line like, “The arpeggios are a little derivative,” and make it sound natural (or keep me from snorting with laughter when they do).

Bland as they may be, at least Woodall and Liu don’t embarrass themselves like 89-year-old Dustin Hoffman, who stumbles around the first third of the movie mumbling lines that feel less like a seasoned veteran adlibbing lines to improve the scenes and more like a bored icon who hasn’t even bothered to read the script. It’s sad, but because he’s really only there to squeeze in another cliche plot twist, at least nobody suffers too long.