The Last Thing He Wanted (2020)
Directed by Dee Rees
No — The Last Thing He Wanted is not especially woke, scoring 36 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Last Thing He Wanted arrives with the pedigree of a serious picture and the reception of a small kitchen fire.
Consciousness Markers
Rees explicitly added and enlarged the character of Jones to serve as commentary on race absent from Didion's novel, framing Elena's trust of the white Morrison over the Black Jones as a study in racial dynamics.
The cast is notably diverse (Rosie Perez, Edi Gathegi, Mel Rodriguez) and director Dee Rees deliberately expanded the role of the Black character Jones and cast Ben Affleck for the racial baggage he carries, giving the ensemble a conscious representational dimension.
The film critiques the Iran-Contra arms trade and American imperialism, with Rees describing Morrison as a personification of the system, though the critique is geopolitical rather than an explicit eat-the-rich economic polemic.
The film carries thematic commentary on American imperialism and race, but it is a murky, information-dense thriller rather than a preachy message movie.
A woman director (Dee Rees) helms a story centered on a fearless female investigative journalist navigating a male-dominated world of power brokers, though the film does not foreground an explicit feminist thesis.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear in this political thriller.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body positivity themes or messaging appear.
The father's dementia is a plot device rather than a neurodivergence advocacy element.
The film is a fictionalized thriller set against real historical events (Iran-Contra) rather than a revisionist reframing of history.
Why it received this score
The Last Thing He Wanted arrives with the pedigree of a serious picture and the reception of a small kitchen fire. Dee Rees, working from Joan Didion's 1996 novel alongside Marco Villalobos, assembles Anne Hathaway, Willem Dafoe, Ben Affleck and a fine supporting bench, then buries them in a plot about arms trafficking, Iran-Contra, and a journalist who cannot stop walking into rooms she should avoid. Critics were unanimous in their displeasure, and a five percent rating on the review aggregator carries a certain grim efficiency. Everybody hated it, as the director herself observed. There is no arguing with the verdict, though there is something to classify.
The casting carries a conscious design. Rees enlarged the role of Jones, the French intelligence officer played by Edi Gathegi, so that Elena's refusal to trust him, even as he repeatedly saves her life, could function as a quiet study in racial dynamics that Didion's novel never bothered with. Casting Affleck as Morrison was, by the director's own account, a decision about the baggage he drags behind him, the white figure Elena instinctively believes over the Black one who keeps pulling her out of the water. Rosie Perez and Mel Rodriguez round out an ensemble more diverse than the genre typically manages. The film announces none of this. It arranges the pieces and lets the audience do the arithmetic.
Such politics as the film possesses are geopolitical. Morrison is described by his director as a personification of the system, and the machinery of American meddling in Central America gets a thorough going-over, though the result is a fog of names, agencies, and shipping manifests. The film lectures no one. It barely explains anything. What we are left with is a muddled thriller holding a genuine racial thought somewhere inside it, which is not the worst thing a hundred-million-dollar Netflix production has ever been.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
At the turning point of the Iran-Contra affair, Elena McMahon, a fearless investigative journalist covering the 1984 US presidential campaign, puts herself in danger when she abandons her assigned task in order to fulfill the last wish of her ailing father, a mysterious man whose past activities she barely knows.
Questions about The Last Thing He Wanted
Is The Last Thing He Wanted woke?
No — The Last Thing He Wanted is not especially woke, scoring 36 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Based.
Does The Last Thing He Wanted have any woke elements?
4 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Racial Consciousness (55), Representation Casting (50) and Eat the Rich (30). On Racial Consciousness: Rees explicitly added and enlarged the character of Jones to serve as commentary on race absent from Didion's novel, framing Elena's trust of the white Morrison over the Black Jones as a study in racial dynamics.
How does The Last Thing He Wanted compare to other 2020 movies?
It ranks #44 of the 227 films from 2020 we've scored; their average is 21. The wokest is One Night in Miami... (83).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.