Rating: 1.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 27/52 | Neo-Exploitation
Bradley Thomas pulls up to the auto shop in his tow truck, a car in tow. His boss is waiting for him outside to lay him off. He cleans out his locket and jumps in his baby blue Pontiac Formula. He gets home and finds his trash can overturned. His wife, Lauren, is sitting in her car. He opens her car door and pulls back her hair to see a hickey on her neck. Lauren admits to having an affair. He punches through her driver’s window and disassembles her car by hand in a bloodied rage.
Afterward, Bradley sits down with Lauren to discuss their relationship. She seems nonplussed about his bloodied knuckles full of glass. He uses a metaphor for getting gas station coffee and always grabbing skim milk instead of cream to express how unfair life has been to him. So, he wants to start over with a clean slate and try to have another kid. And to make things work, he’s going to traffick drugs for his friend Gil.
Eighteen months pass. Bradley makes a drug drop-off, gets a fat wad, and returns to his swanky house. Bradley gets a call from Gil and meets him at his place. Bradley and Gil meet with Eleazar, who tasks Bradley with a crystal meth pickup in exchange for three months of paternity leave. Bradley doesn’t trust them but goes along with it. We’re already a half-hour in, so yadda yadda yadda, the drug deal is a police trap, and Bradley goes to prison for seven years.
The meaning of the film’s title and the inciting incident don’t happen until halfway through the movie, which is also around the time I started wishing for the movie to be over.
The film plays like a conservative persecution complex. Vince Vaughn is a “redneck” who “owns two American flags” and “won’t watch movies with subtitles.” Bone Tomahawk was weirdly racist, but at least it had “period drama” to account for it (sort of). Here, there’s no obvious excuse.
But that’s not why people talk about this movie. They want that ultra-violence. Like Cronenberg, Zahler tries to make the violence as visceral as possible. Unlike Cronenberg, who does it to make the violence unglamorous and unappealing, Zahler relishes the grotesque and knows its audience does too.
Of course, it looks like I’m in the minority here. And I don’t think anyone “should” feel the same way about it. I’m sure you can find inconsistencies in my reviews about when this stuff rubs me the wrong way. But here, it did.
Also, in no world did this need to be over 2 hours long.