I've been waiting to review this movie for almost a year and there are rarely times that I feel the restrictions of being an American audience, but it looks like it's finally time to take a look at Franklyn.

Franklyn is a UK film that apparently few have heard of, even though I originally saw the trailer on Apple.com. It's an extremely dichotic sci-fi / mumblecore drama that is hard to understand, thus hard to explain. Nothing really serves and an introduction to the plot, but you can immediately identify that at least some of the film occurs in London, following the separate lives of Emilia, Milo and Peter, as well as Jonathan Preest, a denizen of fictional Meanwhile City.

As good as I was hoping this film would be, the continuity leaves everything to be desired. I know it's multiple simultaneous stories like Crash, but many scenes are a few minutes long and cut to an unrelated scene. There's no transition, just hard cuts to completely unrelated content.

Meanwhile City appears to be straight out of Dark City, a large, dystopian version of Victorian England, with huge skyscrapers and a missing sun. It's not completely uncivilized, but there's no explanation of this fictional realm and how it ties into the real world. The mystery of it all comes together in the last half hour or so, when you start realizing that things aren't as cool as they appear.

At first glance, it seems that Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillipe, the guy in the mask) is some sort of Batman vigilante; he even narrates like in a graphic novel. The mask and costume are actually quite catching, as it leaves everything up to body language. But he's completely unremarkable and doesn't appear to be very useful to the side of justice. It's a shame that the film was executed like a written story. I'd like to read a novelization of Franklyn, but this is just a jumbled mess.

Addressing one of the most important issues, I have no idea who or what Franklyn actually is. I don't think anyone actually speaks the name throughout the entire film. I take that back, someone reads a note and asks, "Who's Franklyn?" Well said. If this review is in any way useless and hard to read, imagine watching the film. I must have watched it at least three times and have no idea what else to say about it.