I wasted two hours of my life on 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri yesterday.

Shockingly bad movie.

A couple of minutes in I realized what kind of agenda the movie had with the first interaction between Sam Rockwell's character and one of the black gentleman putting up the billboards, the first of several lamely written proxies in the film.

Every character is a caricature; Rockwell's aforementioned character reminding me of Dax Shepard's character in Idiocracy. Every person in the movie is portrayed as a dribbling moron, apart from McDormand and all the black characters.

The script, too, is poorly written. What is this woman's motivation for putting up the billboards I kept waiting patiently to figure out? Yes, her daughter died brutally, but how were Willoughby and the rest of the police department culpable of not doing their jobs properly? We never really figure out. The closest we come is one of several ham-fistedly scripted scenes where McDormand says every man in the country should be put into a database or some shit. Eh, ok? Apparently, the police department is racist, though, but this has no real tangible link to the investigation surrounding her daughter's death. It merely gives Rockwell an excuse to chew scenery, and the Oscars to celebrate how racist America is while lauding another movie that portrays the entire American South as racist and/or stupid.

Another example of the movie's poor scripting, tone deafness and chronically bad dialogue is a cack-handed flashback where McDormand's daughter says she "hopes she gets raped" after storming out of the house the night, she, you know, gets raped and murdered.

The movie struggles, and fails, to find a balance between the seriousness of the subject matter and humour. All through the movie I was wondering is this supposed to be a comedy? An example is the girlfriend of McDormand's ex-husband. I thought it would have had more merit if the ex had shacked up with a 19 year old because he was subconsciously trying to replace his daughter, but, no, the movie basically uses the 19 year old as comic relief in a movie that already has several comic relief characters, including a midget, and doesn't really warrant comic relief.

This brings me to McDormand. Her acting was very good, but a better writer and director would've gotten a better sense of the character. As it is, she resembles a female version of Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence or Bruce Willis in Death Wish playing the female lead in an exploitation movie, rather than shouldering the serious, character-driven piece this should've been. The scene where she kicked a male and female student respectively in the groin area after throwing a can at her car is probably the most egregious example of this movie being a tonal mess and looking for laughs at the wrong time.

Rockwell's character's "redemption" takes the cake in terms of poor writing, though. Someone who turns from dribbling, racist lunatic to conscientious, hard-nosed detective in the space of what must be days in the movie. Don't get me started on the sequence where he attempts to murder someone (which the movie appears to subsequently forget about, as he doesn't appear to be under any sort of IA investigation) and one of the mea culpa proxies, Lester Freamon from The Wire, is introduced in a predictably heavy-handed manner.

I keep mentioning tone deafness, but I haven't even mentioned the best part. The ex-husband having a 19 year old girlfriend is a recurring plot device, yet Woody Harrelson's wife doesn't look a day over 25!

I will end my rant now before I accidentally spoil anything, but, it bears repeating; Rockwell's arc is crucial to the second half of the movie, but, it is written poorly, Freamon's character doesn't really go anywhere and seems to basically be a morally upstanding black character for the sake of the movie's liberal bent in a movie that portrays every white "redneck" character as racist and/or stupid caricatures, and the movie doesn't figure out how properly to transition the co-lead role from Harrelson to Rockwell.