I SAW THE DEVIL And It's Really Lame

This is an apology.

I've only ever walked out of one movie in my lifetime, and it happened when I was eleven years old. One summer day in 1997, my pre-pubescent mind just couldn't handle the ridiculous kangaroo-samurai of WARRIORS OF VIRTUE, and refused to tolerate it for one more minute. I headed to the lobby to eat my peanut butter cups in peace and wait for my dad and brother. This seemingly simple act had two complex, long-lasting effects on my impressionable young mind: one, witnessing the magic of slacker movie theatre employees shoot the shit about movies while all the theatres were in and they had nothing to do can probably be directly correlated to my working in movie theatres for the better part of a decade; and two, in the days and months to come, I began to suspect that maybe I had missed ... something ... by walking out of WARRIORS OF VIRTUE, something ill-defined but valuable, and I resolved to never walk out of a film again (a later viewing of the specific film in question during my twenties did nothing to definitively prove this notion, at least as it relates to the kangaroo-samurai genre).

Of course, I've come close to walking out of films since then: I've written about my disdain for Clint Eastwood's GRAN TURINO before, one of my favourite whipping-boys, and there have been some truly regrettable experiences that refuse to leave my cinematic memory, from KICKIN' IT OLD SKOOL to ACROSS THE UNIVERSE. On the search for new, exciting films, you're bound to find a few that don't speak to you. That's just part of the gamble. I suffer through these films with a certain begrudging acceptance, in a sort of unspoken pact with the movie gods that this is just the way it goes, sometimes.

But when I see a film like I SAW THE DEVIL (AKMAREUL BOATDA), I get angry.


I bemoan films like GRAN TURINO or ACROSS THE UNIVERSE because of the tremendous amount of skill and talent that went into making these films, all in service of hackneyed ideas (as opposed to a work like KICKIN' IT OLD SKOOL, which is just a cinematic abortion from frame one). I SAW THE DEVIL firmly belongs to this category. It's a tremendously polished and affecting film, plunging you into an incredibly disturbing serial rapist/killer story and never really letting you go.

"Harrowing" is an overused word, especially in film. Splashing any word on the cover of K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER will rob that word, whatever that word is, of some of its power. But I SAW THE DEVIL is harrowing in the true sense of the word. It's beyond hard to watch, its violence graphic and sudden, shocking even to jaded viewers. It got underneath my skin, and such power has to be commended. If visceral reaction was the only merit on which we judged film, I would applaud I SAW THE DEVIL and urge you all to see it.

But viscera is not the only criteria on which we should judge film. Film should serve a higher purpose than that. I SAW THE DEVIL does nothing with its incredible power. It is more than content to play out a seemingly never-ending string of horrifying scenes in front of you, then make a half-hearted, cynical attempt to make this a story about how becoming a monster to stop a monster will ruin more lives than it brings justice to. If memory serves, no less than three characters have a line to that exact effect, using a sledgehammer to drive home thematic ideas when it's been using a scalpel for everything else. It's a film that gives the viewer tremendous credit, except when it comes to the big stuff. It's bereft of ideas, or at least ideas beyond a higher plane of cool and or bloodcurdling ways to kill people.

I'm not going to pretend that my criticism of this film isn't rooted in moral outrage. This film offended me. I'm not against displaying the horrors that humanity is capable of, but there has to be a reason for putting those things on display for me. It's the reason I have a problem with the bulk of the horror genre, or at least the sections of it that isn't straight-out exploitative outrageousness (PIRANHA 3D) or has larger social implications (FRAILTY, THE THING). The director of I SAW THE DEVIL, Jee-woon Kim, previously made THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WEIRD, a film that I loved, so maybe I'm not seeing something. Feel free to open my eyes with comments below.

When the film was finally over (I think even the most strident fan of this film would have to admit that you don't need 147 minutes to tell this story), I was getting up to leave and overheard the man in front of me mention something about how great the film was. It was a viewpoint I couldn't understand, had no sympathy for nor had an interest in exploring, and I left the theatre and went home without saying so much as "goodbye" to the friends I had come to the theatre with.

So to those friends, sorry I left without talking to you. It was the closest I could get to walking out on the movie. Why don't you come over one night and we'll watch WARRIORS OF VIRTUE together?

Let's Play The Blame Game

BATTLE: L.A. is an atrocious movie.


Just how atrocious? Like a perfect storm of atrociousness. I haven't wanted to get out of a theatre this badly since Clint Eastwood's GRAN TURINO, and I almost ended friendships with people over that movie.

Unlike Clint's grumpy-man-learns-to-love senility exercise though, this is an alien invasion movie. Not only should I have been primed to love this, but even if it was sub-par, I should have at least been entertained. I mean, I'm the guy that watched James McTiegue's THE INVASION all the way through. Remember the $7.25 that made? That was me. Instead, halfway through BATTLE: L.A., I was wondering if I had literally seen every single moment of this movie before, in one form or another, and if a Mad Libs: Army book could have written a better script.

Playing the blame game with this stinking pile of shit is like having complaints about the Oscars: at some point, the well-deserved scorn reaches critical mass, and all you can do is sit back and wonder about the point of the entire process. So instead of bemoaning some of the most horrifyingly condescending ADR I've ever heard, or lamenting the sheer pointlessness of immediately dropping an audience into combat, only to pull them out and drown them in twenty minutes of expositional character scenes, I want to examine the whole point of playing the blame game. Where does disappointment come from, and why do we feel like meting out punishment for those that fail our expectations?

To examine this, allow me to lambast Ridley Scott's BLACK HAWK DOWN, a clear stylistic influence on BATTLE: L.A.


Ridley Scott doesn't get a fair shake around this blog, and I'm damn proud of that. Unlike his brother, Ridley aims for greatness, and while that may be admirable, it makes his failures that much larger. Such is the case with BLACK HAWK DOWN, an intriguing portrait of warfare that completely misses the point of the events it dramatizes. In fact, everything after the 30-minute mark might as well be labelled "Jerry Bruckheimer and the U.S. Army's BLACK HAWK DOWN" in that every U.S. soldier is a shining example of grounded moral fortitude.

Stephen Gaghan, the writer of TRAFFIC and the criminally underrated (and underseen) SYRIANA, tells a great story about being brought in to pitch his take on the events in Somalia to Scott and Bruckheimer. Essentially, Gaghan wanted to end the film on the image of hundreds of dead Somalians wrapped in food shipment sheets, reused as body bags, that had been branded with the stamp "Gift of the U.S.A.". Needless to say, that idea didn't really float Jerry's boat, and the resulting film decides to skirt around the questionable ethics of the situation in favour of celebrating the noble fraternity of the U.S. military (which, God knows, we haven't had enough films about yet). The entire film is a compromise, wherein Ridley gets to play with all of Uncle Sam's nice helicopters, as long as he doesn't say anything too mean about what they do. In an unrelated story, Stephen Gaghan hasn't been able to get a film off the ground for the last six years.

The disappointment I have for BLACK HAWK DOWN is rooted in the fact that it never achieves what it can be, or perhaps more accurately, what I want it to be. There's potential for great drama in the situation, but the film minimizes it and focuses on something we've seen hundreds of times before. BATTLE L.A. has the exact same problem: it doesn't only imitate the visual style of BLACK HAWK DOWN, but the thematic interests as well. I know it's unfair to compare the very real horrors of Mogadishu with an alien invasion used as entertainment; but as far as the filmmakers are concerned, these are both background issues, less important in themselves than how they affect the main characters. So instead of delving into the alien invasion, we get to see Aaron Eckhart telling kids to "be my little Marine", or Michelle Rodriguez sneer her way through another Michelle Rodriguez performance. The problem is that we didn't come to see a movie about a platoon of soldiers: we came to see an alien invasion movie. We don't care about any of these people, and it doesn't help that they're all walking stereotypes that never create a real connection with the audience. They don't connect to a reality, especially not the reality we expected to see.

So if disappointment, at least in this case, springs from not reflecting a reality we expect, what does that tell us about playing the blame game? We traditionally use blame to place the responsibility for failure at the feet of a few select people: for example, Jerry Bruckheimer can be blamed for making BLACK HAWK DOWN a jingoistic ode to the American serviceman, and Ridley Scott can be blamed for bowing to the Army and Mr. Bruckheimer's interests in bringing their vision to the screen. It's comforting to think that somewhere out there, in some alternate universe, there's a version of BLACK HAWK DOWN that didn't involve these two people, and presents a more accurate and responsible picture of the events in Somalia in 1993. It's comforting because the alternative is that the entire system is at fault. BLACK HAWK DOWN was destined to be what it is, and no one could have made it any better than it is, not even Ridley's brother.


Interestingly, I also saw THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU the other day, a film which has similar questions of fate at heart, then decides, that's interesting and all, but what if Matt Damon has to use the forces of destiny to stop a wedding? I suppose I should be grateful; at least he didn't have to stop Emily Blunt from getting on a plane. THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU is merely a bad movie, though, not a train wreck that just keeps happening, like some sort of Leslie Nielsen-tinged nightmare, and it feels easy to blame writer/director George Nolfi or studio brass for attempting to shoehorn a traditional romance into a existential sci-fi. There are only three or four choices that ruin the film for me, and make it unrealistic, either logically or emotionally.

When you look at the sheer vastness of the number of horrible decisions involved in almost every aspect of BATTLE: L.A., though, what else can you do but assume that the entire system is irreparably screwed up? We're just going to have to accept that horrible, horrible films will continue to get made until the day we die. Some of us will even pay $7.25 for them.

Now who should I blame for that?