BEFORE: Brett Gelman carries over from "Metal Lords" - it's the middle film of a 3-film Gelman mini-chain so I don't HAVE to watch this, but I've got the room (at the moment) and also, I worked at the premiere screening of this film back in April 2024, so it will be good to get to another film I've been curious about. Look, I don't know anyone else who approaches movies the way I do, if there's something I want to see, I don't just go watch it, I put it on a list and kind of wait a year or two for an opportunity, it's all about delayed gratification - I really only allow myself to see something RIGHT AWAY if it's "Star Wars" or Marvel.
THE PLOT: A fever dream film that follows Boy, a deaf person with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to become an instrument of death.
AFTER: What in the "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" did I just watch?
This is a film set in some kind of dystopian setting, past, future, post-apocalypse, I'm not really sure, but it's definitely outside some kind of Asian city where very bad things happen because of class differences. The rich people who run the city-state, the Van Der Koys, have eliminated crime completely (umm, except for themselves) yet still perform an annual ritual called "The Culling" where they choose 12 "guilty" citizens to be taken away and killed on TV in a sort of gladiatorial combat, only the regular citizens don't really have a chance against the armed soldiers. I suppose it's a bit like "The Hunger Games" only there's no winner among the chosen, they just all get killed in the name of entertainment.
We follow a young boy named Boy, as he is trained in combat methods for vengeance against Hilda Van Der Hoy, by a shaman who is very cruel to him along the way, he's definitely not taking after Mr. Miyagi from "The Karate Kid". He rarely even feeds Boy, and forces him to do impossible tasks like rolling a giant statue head uphill, and naturally it keeps rolling back in Sisyphean fashion. Through flashbacks we learn that Boy watched his mother and sister die at the hands of the Van Der Hoys, maybe in one of their cullings, and through flash-forwards we see him grow up very quickly, in a time-lapse montage style. When the boy is a young man, and the Culling comes around again, he decides that it's finally time to act.
Glen Van der Hoy (he's only in the family by marriage) shoots someone in the crowd during the speech announcing the Culling, and this sets off a riot. The family's enforcer, June27, is sent in to combat the rioters with her martial arts skills. Between her and Gideon Van Der Koy setting things straight, they quell the riot with only a pile of bodies left, and they take some live citizens away as Tributes for the Culling. Boy decides to follow them back, basically doing parkour across the city to catch up with their car and hide in their trunk.
I should point out that Boy is haunted by an imaginary likeness of his dead sister, Mina - only he can see her, and she kind of acts like his conscience, the Jiminy Cricket analog. Boy also can't speak because someone cut out his tongue, but he does have a mental voice that only we, the audience, and his imaginary dead sister, can hear. Sorry if this is getting weirder and weirder as I go, but I swear it's not my fault.
Once the Van Der Koys drive to a weapons warehouse, Boy gets out and is attacked by Glen and some soldiers, but he teams up with a gun assembler named Basho, and together they (mostly Boy) kill all the soliders, but accidentally also kill Glen, just as Glen is offering to help get them inside the Van Der Koy mansion. Whoopsie. So they escape and Basho takes Boy to the headquarters of the Resistance, however since Basho left all the other Resistance members have been killed or quit except for one other guy, Benny. Well, there's a team of three now (four if you count the imaginary Mina) and they come up with a plan to infiltrate the mansion and track down and kill all the Van Der Koys, especially Hilda. The problem is that Boy doesn't know all of the words that Basho and Benny are saying, so instead of learning the whole plan, we hear it from Boy's P.O.V., which means it contains a lot of nonsense words, and if he can't understand it, then we can't understand it.
Nevertheless, they get inside the mansion and Boy stumbles upon all of the Van Der Koys eating dinner together, so he decapitates Hilda at the head of the table, only to find out that this was a decoy dinner, with actors hired who looked a bit like the Van Der Koys. Gideon figured that maybe someday someone would try to assassinate them at their celebratory Culling dinner, and darn if he wasn't right. Boy is captured by June27, and we never get to see her face, she's always wearing a helmet - and I've said before, there's really only one reason that somebody wears a helmet in most films. But surprisingly, Gideon wants to help Boy and set him loose against his family, because (conveniently) he's become tired of killing innocent people and ruling over the city, or perhaps he just wants to shake things up a bit. More likely, a screenwriter couldn't think of another way to move the plot forward.
So we move forward to the big telecast of the Culling, with Boy as one of the citizens to be sacrificed - I mean, to compete. But as I said before, it's hardly a fair fight, because the other side has soldiers and weapons and like four different breakfast cereal mascots, while the citizens are unarmed and untrained, so it's almost certain death for them, but hey, at least they get to be TV stars before they die. But SURPRISE, Benny and Basho from the resistance show up before Boy can be killed, and they've got weapons, so you know, at least they've got a chance against the soldiers - a very very small one. Boy manages to execute Melanie Van Der Koy, the sister who runs the TV network, but Benny and Basho get wounded in the big battle. Out in the hall, Boy gets the key to Hilda's bunker from Gideon, and then Boy kills him. Again, it feels like this is very forced, like some screenwriter couldn't think of another way for Boy to get that bunker key.
At the endgame in the bunker, Boy comes face to face with Hilda Van Der Koy, the woman that the shaman trained him to hate and kill. But, of course there's a twist, and I won't reveal it here but maybe you can figure it out from what you know about movie cliches. But basically Boy learns that everything he knows is wrong, his memories are maybe not real and suddenly when he's face to face with Hilda he starts to remember some of the real old memories and figure out which memories were planted in their place, and maybe just how the Shaman managed to do that with his combination of torture, drugs and hypnosis. And of course the woman who wears the helmet mask turns out to be someone, which of course is the reason that she always wore the mask, we just weren't ready for that information yet, and neither was Boy.
That's all I'll say about the plot - honestly there really isn't much plot here, because the movie is nearly wall-to-wall all fight scenes. And they get bigger and more ridiculous as the film goes on. It's a damn shame that the title "One Battle After Another" was used on a different film, because it does kind of perfectly describe all that happens here. At some point this all just becomes murder porn, I can't say exactly when that happens, but it definitely gets there.
It's the three-year anniversary of this film's first screening, at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2023. So I guess what I worked at was the theatrical premiere in New York in April 2024, which also coincided with the release of a video-game based on the arcade game seen in the film, "Super Dragon Punch Force 3". I hope you caught that if you like "Street Fighter" type games.
Directed by Moritz Mohr
Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Nosferatu"), Jessica Rothe (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "The Show"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Here"), Isaiah Mustafa (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Yahan Ruhian (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Cameron Crovetti (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Nicholas Crovetti, Quinn Copeland, Andrew Koji (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Sharlto Copley (last seen in "Heads of State"), Dawid Szatarski (last seen in "Black Widow"), Dorothy Ann Gould, Rolanda Marais, Jane de Wet, Jody Abrahams, Ilse Klink, Jasmine Maylam, Kevin Otto (last seen in "The Kissing Booth 2"), Nicky Rebelo, Nena Butler, Zainab Azizi, Katherine Neethling, Blake Isaacs, Inge Beckmann (last seen in "Escape Room"), Pierre Nelson, Natalia Aleksandrowa, Martin Munroe, Ashley Dowds, Shane John Kruger (last seen in "G20"),
and the voices of H. Jon Benjamin (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Francois Chau (last seen in "The Boy Next Door"),
RATING: 4 out of 10 macarons, all different flavors in a stack on a plate
No comments:
Post a Comment