BEFORE: You may have heard of S.A.D., or Seasonal Affective Disorder, it's a form of depression that takes place during winter, the cold, dark days that make you feel that life is hopeless and it's never going to get better. I've had something akin to that this week, only it's brought on by too many schlocky action movies with Bruce Willis in them. If I were really enjoying them, I'd call this week BruceDance or BrunoDance, because I know the Sundance Film Festival just started a couple days ago, but as it is, I just want the week to be over. The good news is that I'm already six films in, so it's 2/3 over and there are just two films to go. Yep, I programmed this 9-film sub-chain, and it started with just "The Cold Light of Day" and tomorrow's film from cable, and look what it turned into.
I thought maybe I'd have to spend $3.99 to watch this one on iTunes, but then I found out that's streaming FREE on Pluto TV. Yeah, that's probably not a good thing, because the best movies are the ones you have to pay for.
THE PLOT: At a bachelorette party in a Cleveland nightclub, the bride tells two guys offering drugs to go away. They abduct her, and the groom's two big brothers who looked after him as kids do so again as veterans, looking for her and the kidnappers.
AFTER: In addition to my main watchlist, and the other list of films I'd like to add to my watchlist, and the list of the films I've seen, I've got another list, of the films I've seen but don't have physical copies of, and it's a long, slow process, but if cable TV runs a movie that's on that last list, I'll dub it to DVD and cross it off the list. You know, in case I get a sudden urge to watch THAT movie, out of the thousands that I own, and it's not available at that moment on cable or any streaming service. Umm, this never really happens, but I'm prepared for it should the need arise. Now, on that list is a film called "The Young Poisoner's Handbook", which I haven't thought about in a long while - there's no point, because no cable channel ever runs this movie, I saw it a Sundance years ago and I haven't seen it since. I'm only thinking about it now, because I happened to glance at that list of films that I may never see again, or have a copy of in any format. (Seriously, it's not even on iTunes, and nearly everything is there... It looks like it was on Tubi at some point, but no longer. Where do films go when they die?)
The film's based on a true story about a British teenager who was very intelligent in the ways of chemistry, but completely amoral, and he managed to poison his friends, family and co-workers. Yeah, it's not a happy film, and that may be why it's unavailable, nobody's going to seek it out and watch it, because mostly people want to have a good time and enjoy movies and not think about whether their friends or family members are secretly trying to kill them with poison. I think something like this is part of the problem with "Acts of Violence", and why it's available on Pluto TV for free, who is going to pay good money, even $2 or $3, to watch a movie that's a feel-bad film - that's the opposite of a feel-good film, obviously.
To some extent, we watch movies to fool ourselves, to forget for a couple hours about the entropy of the universe, how we're all going to die someday, that everything, our jobs and our relationships, has an expiration date, and the clock is always ticking. But you figure you can probably get through the next 90 to 100 minutes once you start a movie, and for a short time at least, everything's going to be OK. So now I'm scratching my head whenever I encounter a movie that works the other way, it doesn't help us out by giving us a happy ending or a resolution or what our lizard brain wants to just feel something close to OK for a couple hours. And this brings me back to "Acts of Violence" - why not just give the audience what they want, what they need, would that be so wrong?
This film starts with a war veteran, from Iraq or Afghanistan no doubt, feeling underserved by his point of contact at the V.A. This is topical, great start, but we also get some attitude from this veteran guy, because even though the guy at the V.A. is trying to help him, even complimenting him on the profound poem that he wrote, it seems like nothing will satisfy him. He's not sleeping well, the medication's not working, and he ends up storming out of the office. I get it, he's been through some shit, but jeez, at least let some people help you out. And I'm supposed to like this character with a giant chip on his shoulder? His two younger brothers have something of a better attitude, they're partying at home with their ladies, one is married and the other is about to get married. Plans for a bachelor party at a strip club and a bachelorette party the same night are in the works. Uh-oh. Nothing good ever happens at these events in a movie, probably not in real life either.
At the same time, a burnt-out, hard-drinking police detective is raiding makeshift brothels, places where teen girls are taken prisoner and forced to service strangers, and they're kept doped up on elephant tranqulizers (seriously?) which is slowly killing them. You'd think this would be bad for business, killing off their own kidnapped sex slaves, and you'd be right - the big boss just wants the drugs tweaked so they don't kill the girls, that's bad for business. The cops raiding all his brothels, that's bad for business too, so he just wants things to go right. Yeah, something tells me this is a bad business model all around, but what do I know? That's Cleveland for you, I guess? Like I say, in general this is not a happy film.
Of course, these two different worlds are about to collide, the bride-to-be gets kidnapped after she disses two of the traffickers in the club, and they shove her into a black SUV out in the alley behind the club. By the time her fiancé and his two brothers find out she's been taken, she's been moved to three different locations, microchipped and beat up, threatened and so on. Plans are afoot to close the Cleveland operations and move all their girls to Vegas, and we assume by. then she'll be so deep into the system that she'll never be found again. Look, I'm not saying this doesn't happen, a certain number of people do disappear every year, and for all I know, this is the type of thing that goes on. But it's just not the type of thing I want to encounter when I sit down to watch a movie, and I don't think I'm alone here.
The three brothers have to go all vigilante in order to figure out the rules of the underground trafficking system, they have to arm up and shoot a bunch of underlings just to find the underboss in charge, and then basically torture him to find the next guy up the chain, and so on. They've got to go outside the law just to make things right, and I'm just not sure that sends the right message out to the audience. In this films the cops are well-meaning but ineffective, and then even when the cops crack the case and come close to making a difference, they get the orders from on high to stand down, because the head villain's going to flip on some associates, so he gets immunity. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in real life, but it's yet another bummer thing to use as a plot point in a film.
The other weird thing to think about, the other weird message here, is how could this all have been avoided? Should the bride-to-be have been more receptive to the thugs in the club? Should she have shared drugs with them, or given them what they want (sexually) so they'd be happy and just go away? I think she was in trouble no matter what, but that's HER fault for being a young, attractive woman partying in a club in a short dress? That's also a terrible message. Maybe this is really a complex examination of the troubled mess on the American streets, how in any big city in America there's some form of criminal underworld, guns, drugs and human trafficking that the justice system is nearly helpless to control. It seems, though, that some filmmaker was headed more in the direction of "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun", and that didn't really work out well in the end, either.
Maybe I'm off base here, maybe I missed the point, or I got the point but I refused to accept it - but this film's just a bummer all the way through. Perhaps if the film had a happier ending, then it just wouldn't ring true. But the first rule of filmmaking, I think, is to be entertaining, and I'm hard pressed to think of who would be entertained by the events herein. Actually, I think I'd worry about that person just a bit.
Also starring Cole Hauser (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Shawn Ashmore (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Ashton Holmes (last seen in "Smart People"), Melissa Bolona, Sean Brosnan, Sophia Bush (last seen in "Marshall"), Mike Epps (last seen in "Death Wish" (2018)), Tiffany Brouwer (last seen in "The Help"), Jenna B. Kelly (last seen in "Extraction"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Rotimi (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Matthew T. Metzler, Kyle Stefanski, Boyd Kestner (last seen in "Appaloosa"), Nicolas Petron (last seen in "Reprisal"), David Vegh (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), with cameos from Martin Blencowe (last seen in "Extraction"), Christopher Rob Bowen (ditto), John Dauer (ditto).
RATING: 4 out of 10 airholes in a crate
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