So You Won't Have To: Red State

 This might sound strange, but I really prefer not writing So You Won't Have To reviews. It saves me the time of sitting through some unendurable piece of crap, and generally speaking you wouldn't be seeing it anyway (e.g. Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong and Monsterwolf). However, enough people at work have been asking about Kevin Smith's Red State, a movie I had the misfortune of seeing the other day. Not only is it bad for a film; it's barely coherent as a Kevin Smith movie (one must accordingly lower one's standards for a director who openly admits he won't film action sequences* because it's too hard). Well, I'll save you the trouble of dropping any money on this waste of 88 minutes. If you paid upwards of $60 to see the film earlier this year with Smith in attendance, then I hope it was worth it for you.

 I'm going to try to keep this brief, because just telling you a little bit should go a long way. What starts out as a stupid sex comedy, complete with unlikable protagonists and a teacher that couldn't possibly keep her job for more than a month**, followed by the introduction of a protagonist getting a blowjob on the side of the road (by a guy, because he's shamefully gay. How do we know this? Because when he arrives at the Sheriff's office because he IS the Sheriff, he lies about where he was and cries in front of a picture of his wife). So it's not enough to have to sit through Randy (Ronnie Connell), Jarod (Kyle Gallner), and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) trolling around a Craigslist-esque site in the hopes of having a four-way with a Sarah Cooper (Melissa Leo); they also have to crash into Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root)'s car before being drugged and hauled away.

 To where, you ask? Thankfully, there's no real question about it after a ham-handed introduction to the Five Points Church, which is unmistakably a proxy for the Westboro Baptist Church (who protest military funerals and proudly carry around signs that say "God Hates Fags." Yeah.) Like most of the heavy-handed commentary in the film (more on that in a bit), Smith wastes no time trashing the Church in order to make the fact that they trap Randy, Jarod, and Billy-Ray in order to kill them for their sins. This is the stage of the film that briefly apes Hostel, down to the execution of a separate character while the others scream. It's the only thing that comes close to the "horror" that people have been misled into believing that Red State might be (constant coverage on horror sites like Bloody Disgusting hasn't helped, nor did Smith's initial suggestions it was his "horror film").

 But worry not, because Red State is more of a clumsy mishmash of fundamentalist criticism, sex comedy, and siege film. As though it weren't enough to spend fifteen minutes on Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) delivering a sermon - and I mean fifteen minutes of nothing but said sermon - Smith then turns his critical gaze towards a Waco-like storming of the compound, led by ATF Agent Keenan (John Goodman). Keenan is given orders to wipe out Five Points, and struggles with the excessive use of force. See? It isn't just the hateful church to blame - the government is also reactionary and violent.

 Ugh. Okay, let's be quick about the rest of this. Much ado has been made about how this doesn't "look" like a Kevin Smith film because he shot it mostly handheld on a RED Camera. It's true that it doesn't look like a Kevin Smith film, but that doesn't make the visual style any better. Instead, I get the impression that Smith is very enamored of the handheld style of television, and he tries to ape it to the best of his ability, resulting in arbitrary camera angles, jagged, pointless edits, and his usual framing subverted by the ability to quickly swerve around. The visually unappealing nature compliments the forced, insipid monologues, and that's not a good thing.

 I'm going to go ahead and spoil the end of the film, because it ALMOST went in a direction audacious enough to salvage the garbage preceding it: after Keenan and his men gun down the last of our heroes, a blaring trumpet fills the air. Cooper and his "family" take it as a sign of the Rapture and drop their weapons, preparing to ascend to Heaven. And for a second there, it seemed like Smith was going to go that way, taking Red State in an entirely different direction***. But he doesn't - instead we get a long debriefing of what happened after Cooper tells Keenan to kill him, which he didn't. The three agents turn off the camera documenting the debriefing and get "real" about their excitement to lock up Cooper and subject him to "coke can dick" prison rape. To really underscore his position, Smith closes the film with another mini-monologue from Abin Cooper, followed by an off-screen voice (Smith's) yelling "Shut up!"

 Thank goodness I didn't have to see this film with Kevin Smith fielding questions afterward, because that's exactly what I would say to him.


* See the SModCast Network live interview with Edgar Wright.
** In addition to cursing and cracking homophobic jokes at the expense of her students, she openly denigrates the Westboro Baptist Church proxy in the classroom. Since the film takes place in our litigious present, you find me a teacher that gets away with what she does in the first ten minutes of the movie that isn't Cameron Diaz.
*** At one point, that WAS the ending, but Smith opted to go with a less interesting denouement.