'Chaos Walking' review: Ridley and Holland spark up a great chemistry but film falls flat

As lockdown restrictions lift and more theaters open around the country -- just now in New York and soon in Los Angeles -- you can actually catch "Chaos Walking" on the big screen, where its epic size is the one mark in its favor.

Based on the first book in Patrick Ness' dystopian trilogy of young adult novels, the film quickly descends into rabid incoherence. By the time Viola, played by Daisy Ridley -- the fiery Rey in the latest "Star Wars" trilogy -- crash lands on the planet of New World, circa 2257, everything is already in chaos. There are no women anywhere, just dudes living in a backwater colony called Prentisstown, where the men are cursed with "the Noise" -- a force that puts all their unfiltered feelings on display either out loud or in thought bubbles covered in a purple haze.

No worries. "Chaos Walking" never wanders into territory raunchier than its PG-13 rating. Viola is offered protection by a smitten Todd Hewitt, played by "Spider-Man" star Tom Holland, who is everywhere these days (see "Cherry"). Todd, who lives on a beet farm with two fathers (Demián Bichir and Kurt Sutter) hides the noise in his head by repeating his name over and over, which proves better than a cold shower at his first sighting of a girl. His thought? "Yellow hair, pretty."

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Ridley and Holland spark up a beguiling chemistry that the script buries in enough exposition to produce an epidemic of giant audience yawns and eyestrain from all those blurry thought bubbles. Director and co-writer Doug Liman, whose recent pandemic thriller "Locked Down" was an epic clunker, throws a wet blanket of plot over two of the freshest young stars in the business.

The heavy-handed backstory involves a race of indigenous creatures called the Spackle who reportedly murdered all the women on the planet and fought hard against the genocidal rage of Mayor Prentiss (a mad Mads Mikkelsen), his son Davy (Nick Jonas, deserving better) and a fire-breathing preacher (David Oyelowo, deserving a whole lot better).

It all boils down to an Old West chase movie on horseback, with fantasy trimmings, in which Viola and Todd try to escape without being destroyed by men who become unhinged over fear of the feminine. Or something like that. In the toxic masculinity haven of Prentisstown, any man caught expressing raw feelings is accused of "acting like a woman." #TimesUp for that kind of thinking.

You can also count on time not being kind to "Chaos Walking," a troubled production that actually finished filming way back in 2017. Deemed unreleasable by executives at Lionsgate, the movie scrambled to do costly reshoots, staged not by Liman but Fede Álvarez ("Don't Breathe"), in the hopes of creating a franchise as profitable as the studio's "Hunger Games" or "Twilight" saga. On the basis of what's on screen, there is no way that's going to happen. What's on screen is a hot mess that never manages to walk, much less run. Chaos limping is more like it.