Director: Craig Zobel
Starring: Betty Gilpin, Hillary Swank
You might know this from last fall when Trump and a bunch of other conservative weirdos saw the trailer for this movie and then got mad about that without even waiting to see it! Which, after I’ve now seen it, is hilarious, because it’s basically conservative satire playing right to their base and they didn’t understand it. That makes this at least a little funny.
This thing starts out with the subtlety of a nuclear warhead hitting your house, with a text conversation between a bunch of stereotypical liberal types talking about how they’d love to be at “the Manor” hunting “deplorables” right now. One guy says the president is a “ratfuck” and a lady says what he did “ruined her day.” Oh man, pause it, I need time to digest this mind-bending social commentary. It’s too smart!
Then a bunch of regular-seeming white people with southern and midwestern accents wake up in a field with gags in their mouths. They find a bunch of swords and guns and stuff in a giant box and take them, but this does not seem to help them even a little bit, as their opponents just throw grenades at them. That seems unfair as fuck. It’s like if you agreed to play badminton against someone and, instead, they just fucking threw grenades at you.
I do admit that the way the movie just kills off characters wantonly while implying they’ll be important is pretty funny… that at least adds a charming sort of grindhouse splatter to the whole thing. Too bad that can’t last all movie, since that would be weird and make no sense.
Instead, the REAL plot starts when a bunch of the idiots find a gas station where a mom and pop old people team is at the counter. One dude says he’s from Orlando, FL – the one guy with a basketball jersey and white-dude dreadlocks, of course he’s from my hometown. Fuck you, movie.
The old couple starts spewing a bunch of dialogue about gun rights, and then, after they kill the others – they’re part of the whole thing, oh man! – they get into an argument about whether it’s OK to say “black people” now while cleaning up the bodies. Get it, 'cause they're annoying liberals? The subtlety! It’s burning my eyes! I can’t see anymore and am now having to figure out how to apply for a service animal online!
The main girl turns out to be Betty Gilpin’s character Crystal, who is obviously the lead because she’s the only one not spewing generic conservative stuff about secret societies and libtard cucks and everything. She looks like she is about to cry for the entire film, which made sense after I saw where all this was going. She teams up with Ethan Suplee’s character Gary, who is some kind of Alex Jones style blogger.
There’s one scene where they come across a bunch of illegal immigrants who Gary suspects of being “crisis actors.” Just keep funneling those buzzwords into the script! It’s the cheapest way possible to show how political division is – this shit is like a Facebook comment thread between a bunch of 65 year olds just thrown haphazardly into a blender. Like yeah, just throw in every possible bottom of the barrel cliche. We don't get enough of that in real life. I want to hear about crisis actors and liberal cucks in a movie now, not just in the sewers of the internet. That's good dialogue!
There’s no real characters here for the most part; just strange Frankenstein’s monsters made up of cliches from the most obvious, groan-worthy parts of today's agonizing political discourse. I'm amazed Damon Lindelof wrote this after his quite good take on Watchmen last year. Is it some kind of yin-yang deal? Something about for every good thing you put into the world, there's something negative, too? Dude - you didn't have to do this.
There is some fun violence I guess. Crystal and this old farmer-looking guy get to the compound where all the bad guys are sitting around going “please don’t joke about that” - yes, really. Crystal makes incredibly short work of them all in an entertainingly bloody fashion that I am sure CPAC will make great use of as a ‘let’s get pumped up’ video.
Then we get the big twist that Hillary Swank is in the movie! Happy day! Oh, and also that apparently, the whole plot never existed before conservatives on the internet all started making conspiracy theories about how liberals take conservatives to a big manor and hunt them for sport. So then Swank’s character and the other villains, all high up businesspeople or something, make jokes about it through text and are fired. Then they all decide to make the conspiracy happen for real. They set up an elaborate murder hunt for no reason except that they were accused of it.
The final fight with Swank has her telling Crystal that “you all made it happen.” Which is about as lame of a justification as you can get. “We may have murdered a bunch of people, but you guys posted stuff we didn’t like on the internet.” Well when I think about it for a second, I guess that’s a good justification after all. The internet is life or death and if you can't have a fancy office job, you might as well become a mass murderer. I think that's what Rachel Maddow told me in my dreams.
Oh and also Crystal was apparently not the person they meant to pick for this – there was another lady with her name that they meant to kidnap, and THIS one is a trained badass martial artist. Seems like they should’ve noticed that when she was picking everyone on their side off like they were defenseless babies. But who am I to judge?
I guess the final fight is pretty OK, but how much of it is worth sitting through the rest of this awful steaming shit pile of a movie? I really don’t think it was worth it.
The problem with the twist in this movie is that it doesn’t change all of the stuff from before, which is essentially red meat conservative propaganda – the LIBRULZ are KILLING real AMERICANS! That’s shitty writing. You can argue that it’s all meant to be nonsense and satirical comedy, but the conservative characters, despite some outrageous lines, are shown to be polite, helpful and generally on the same team to help one another when the shit goes down. The liberal elites are just evil cartoons.
It’d actually be fun to lampoon the milquetoast liberals who are all superficial – but this isn’t the way to do it. Even aside from that, the writing is just dumb and dull and everything that happens is just perfunctory to move the plot along. It’s a hollow thing. But have fun paying 20 bucks to rent it on Amazon – what a great investment this has all been for me.
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