Hollywood finally shed its pretensions and made the kind of movie I’ve always wanted to see: one in which Kyra Sedgwick stares on, horrified, while someone threatens the life of her porcelain baby, a terrifying doll-monster which you can be sure she has attempted to nurse at least once, possibly successfully. Maybe humanity’s advancement from Australopithecine to planting a flag on the moon wasn’t such a waste of time, after all.
Villains Review
Being dumb while also having a soul is a tricky barani to land. Michael Bay has never pulled it off, for instance, and Zack Snyder doesn’t even want to, apparently not just fine with but actively looking forward to swallowing a mouthful of pavement and shattered teeth with each botched (or, I guess from his nihilistic vantage point, masterfully realized) attempt. But when implemented correctly a little dumb adds a lot to the proceedings, like some booze in your morning coffee, or your afternoon coffee, or your commute home from work when the only thing keeping you from cutting the wheel and ending things right here, right now in a screaming inferno of twisted metal, aghast bystanders, and darker monsters still is the sweet allure of booze in your evening coffee. What I’m trying to say is you have a problem, and we’re all concerned.
Wait, no, that’s not what I’m trying to say (it’s probably true, though). What I’m trying to say is this: stupid as a supplement to plot, character, and tone rather than a cynical replacement of them is without question a dying art, and hats off to Villains, an otherwise obscure horror-comedy-thriller, for getting it right.
I Learned From Watching You, Dad!
(Bleh, I always forget that you’re supposed to put a plot synopsis right about here. Fine: Villains is a retelling of the Gospel of John, except Jesus is played by the Lawnmower Man, and instead of turning water into wine he just chugs that shit himself and dares anyone to stop him, messy-drunk and firing off Jesus Lightning™ with his free hand whenever someone tries to wrest the jug from him, only occasionally pulling his lips away from that sweet, sweet sin-water long enough to throw out taunts like “what’re you going to do, crucify me? Where would you even find a cross that big? It’s an impractical form of execution which I have no logical reason to fear!” There, now you both know the plot of the movie and have a newfound respect for the Bible.)
One of the best things that Villains does is bring dumb down to the character level. Instead of putting an Everyman Protagonist in an absurd situation (which is what most films do) Villains makes its heroes as unqualified as the conflict is taut. The reason why most movies choose the blander route is obvious: writers have egos, and love to practice self-insertion, so they’d much rather have a dry, sarcastic, talented-but-slacking secret-genius (aka how we all like to view ourselves) up against some crazy plot than have a doofus up against a coherent threat. After all, how can the me-character in the story spend two hours jerking himself off for the audience’s (read: my) amusement if he’s too dumb to get his fly open? Priorities, people.
But Villains embeds the dumb (and later on, the crazy) firmly into its characters and the results are glorious. We see this shit right from the jump. Mickey and Jules, our heroes, rob a gas station convenience store in the opening scene of the movie and spend most of the heist trying to figure out how to get the register open, being so proud of themselves when they realize that they need to buy something first. They then flee in their stolen car and promptly run out of gas, even though they just robbed a gas station convenience store, because they don’t think before, during, and only rarely after they do something. These two are idiots, and I want to adopt them. We’re basically watching two puppies attempt open-heart surgery every time these young lovers try to resolve a conflict, which never stops drawing awwwwsss from the audience even as the puppy-docs kill patient after patient. Our butt-dumb heroes are never not eminently likable, and I’d like to take a moment to clarify how this feat is accomplished by comparing the success of Villains’ stupidity to the dumb moo-cows seen in Army of the Dead:
The white trash morons in Villains are endearingly and depthfully dumb – they experience and exude the full panoply of human emotion, just moronically. This is fine, and wonderful. All emotion must pass through a vector before it is made external and “dumb” is just as viable a prism as anything else. You can do your Le Samurai take on emotion, or you can have the girl from It Follows blowing an evil space clown because they’re both so pumped that they managed to steal $40, money which they really should have spent on gas. In fact, to see how their dumbness doesn’t just get them in trouble but informs every part of their character, even the sentimental parts, just look at what happens in the immediate aftermath of their car running out of gas: Mickey loses his shit but Jules calms him down by playing “car-wash” with him, a game in which she sits on his chest and brushes her hair against his face. This is a game for babies, but it both straightens out their minds and gives us an intimate look at their relationship, which is sincere and heartfelt (“car-wash” even comes back later in the movie! But we’ll get to that later).
CONVERSELY
The white trash morons in Army of the Dead are just dumb – “stupid” isn’t a vector by which we see their deeper selves, it is the entirety of their selves. We’re not supposed to laugh at the feelings that Mickey and Jules have, we’re supposed to laugh at the infantile way in which they express those feelings. In Army of the Farts, on the other hand, we’re supposed to laugh at the characters for having emotions at all. This is a massive distinction that shifts dumb as a concept away from being a tool of realization for the characters and turns it into a weird and cruel cudgel against them and – in a Zack Snyder movie at least – a reason why we should be excited to see them die. Dumb in a Zack Snyder movie isn’t just another facet of the human condition, given focus in the same way that you’d prioritize the power of the human spirit in a Maya Angelou biopic, or a love for gin and bare-knuckle brawling in a Gandhi movie, but rather evidence that all people, everywhere, are defective and deserving of a cruel death. The man has issues!
Anyway, back to the review.
More Character Details!
I love me a character-driven movie, and this flick has richly-realized personality-quirks in spades, and I just want to give some love, here:
Mickey having bouts of judgmental Puritanicalism in between (and sometimes during) stretches of criminal activity is a delight. Dude’s a professional thief, but he takes time to: chide Jules for playing with her tongue stud (it might damage her enamel!); express his disbelief that someone would deadbolt closed a door that he is currently trying to pick the lock on (who deadbolts a door? this is a nice neighborhood!); get annoyed that the keys for the car he is trying to steal are not readily available (who doesn’t have a spare set of keys in the house? what if there’s an emergency!); caution Jules that the basement they’re poking around in might have mold (safety first).
Jules, for her part, is a delight as the more, I’m going to say emotionally-powered doofus of the two. Mickey has his faux-intellectualism and his constant idiot attempts to analyze a situation, and Jules has her impulsiveness. Watching her bork Mickey’s attempt to escape the house by initiating a Mexican standoff with a porcelain doll is wonderful and further illustrates the sincerity of her character mixed inexorably with the fact that she’s a moron.
And all of this comes full cinematic-goddamn-circle with how Mickey and Jules are contrasted with Gloria and George. Both men fancy themselves criminal masterminds, but only hit the mark, I’m going to say twelve percent of the time, while both women initially appear to be supporting characters to their men before revealing that when you rev their engine you really rev their fucking engine. Delicious traits, all around; I wish more movies would derive engaging character traits from the primordial ooze of sheer fucking stupidity, but we’re the species that can’t decide if food should be readily available to hungry children or if letting them starve will teach them valuable lessons in self-reliance and the intricacies of a market economy, so baby steps I guess.
That was a downer of a sentence! Let’s talk about structural shit!
The Greatest Acting in the World Wouldn’t Matter if the Camera Wasn’t Pointed in the Right Direction
Whenever you have a movie that takes place in one, small location the primary benchmark against which its direction will be judged will always be “is the movie bland as hell to watch?” – a low hurdle to clear, certainly, but one that must be addressed before things like visual creativity can be allowed to enter into our consideration. So let’s deal with first issues first: Villains is a delight to look at. This isn’t because of some Kubrickian wide-angle lens shenanigans in which the house is made to look somehow larger than it actually is; in fact, no real effort is made to hide how confined the house feels because that feeling contributes perfectly to the prison-as-run-by-late-career-Vincent-Price-as-directed-by-early-career-Vincent-Price vibe the movie is going for. Everything is folded perfectly into the story that the movie wants to tell! Lean resources are utilized with maximum efficiency! Another vertical line in the “clever, oh-so-clever” column for this gem of a film!
And now we can talk creative stuff.
Visual flourishes don’t abound in this movie, which is a great decision because when they do happen they feel well-deserved. The borderline surrealist framing from within Jules’ hair when she and Mickey play “car-wash” stands out because it’s their safe place away from the terribleness of the world, and an escape from their own stupidity (really, if they seem like different characters in a different movie during these moments it’s not because of bad writing – it’s because you are literally seeing them in a different light, one unencumbered by the whole “they’re actual, literal dumbasses” snafu that bogs them down so often in the waking world). Same goes with Jules climbing up the laundry chute (or that cartoonish sparkle on said chute when it’s pointed out to them): we get a Wes Anderson-esque framing of her climbing up the chute for practical reasons, sure (how else were they going to film it?) but also because it’s such a big moment for the couple that you bet your ass it’s going to get its own unique visual stamp.
Editing and tonal balance are tight as a drum, as well. As mentioned before there are obvious parallels between the two couples, and the way in which the movie separates each of them and edits together subsequent interactions (Mickey and Gloria edited against Jules and George, sometimes, but most notably the men edited against the women) keeps the film chugging along with nice thematic underpinnings even as the drama is escalating in the more traditional “they’ve going to cook our heroes in the oven and eat them, aren’t they. Fucking southerners” way. The highlight of this is probably during the climax, when we actually get George and Gloria’s relationship edited directly against Mickey and Jules’, with both couples achieving the final understandings that they’ll ever have time to reach before being forced to say their goodbyes (with one couple being much better at this than the other!).
(Quick note on tonal balance: the movie does such a good job of balancing its horror, comedy, and thriller tones that even a cynic like me who usually guesses plot twists several acts – and there are usually only three in a movie! That pretty much means I guess the ending to any given movie during the bit before the movie technically starts when the bucket of popcorn tells you to turn your phone off! – in advance couldn’t quite pin down what track we were on – i.e. the inevitably grim ending of a horror movie, or the peaceful resolution of a comedy, etc. Another example of superlative filmmaking, one that can be contrasted with – oh, I don’t know, just pulling a random example from the æther here – a Zack Snyder movie, in which one can always successfully predict what is going to happen next by simply yelling out, during any anticipatory moment in the movie, “a lame attempt at edginess by someone disconcertingly enamored with nihilism!”)
God Placed Me Here to Always Find Something to Complain About, and I Will Never Shy Away From My Reason for Being
OK, so no movie is perfect (except for the third Mighty Ducks movie where Disney took the bold step of stranding the kids in the Andes and forcing them to resort to cannibalism to survive. Say what you want about the inadequacy of Disney’s live-action movies but watching Charlie tearfully chant “quack, quack, quack,” while eating the fat goalie was fucking harrowing.). So here are some not-perfect things that annoyed me, a sensitive man-baby:
Intelligence scales a little bit more than I would like. I understand George becoming unwound as the events of the movie accumulate upon the nice little freakshow he has spent so many years curating, but Mickey has too many moments of clear-headedness for my liking. I don’t mind him being sincere at times and expressing his love for Jules – those are some of my favorite parts of the movie! – but he sometimes is too collected, at least as contrasted with his, uh, less-than-MENSA behavior at other points in the movie. There are some other examples of this, like Jules giving a sad monologue in the basement that seems a touch out of character, but they’re not terrible. More character depth is never a bad thing, and considering that in these moments I’ve mentioned both protagonists have recently realized that they’re not the villains of the story it kind of makes sense that they would attempt to enter hero-mode.
Something I can’t make excuses for, though, is the camcorder that just straight-up shows George and Gloria’s previous victims. Fuck that noise! You gotta build that shit up slowly, movie. The moment when Micky and Jules open the basement door and suddenly their home invasion goes from the deliciously irreverent to the harrowing and portentous is perfect – we the audience immediately know through editing alone that this place houses dark secrets, and that our heroes are about to stumble, unprepared, into said secrets. That’s the turn right there! Don’t blow your load too early with a camcorder just giving away the game! Also, why would criminals as careful as George and Gloria film their crimes?
Another bitch from me, the master of complaints: for all the skill with which the movie balances its disparate tones it kind of loses it right at the end. We get a suuuuuper fucked-up final shot of Gloria and George, and then cut almost immediately to heartfelt, almost manipulative home-movie footage of a happy ending, and then smash-cut to animated credits that are extremely PUNK ROCK FUCK YEAH. That’s… a lot to take place in the span of three or four minutes, and it felt like the movie was trying to resolve each of its tones (perverse, sincere, comedic) three different ways rather than tie them together like it had been doing earlier in the film. I was super pumped to see how the movie was going to simultaneously resolve its myriad of different storytelling styles, and equally let down when it just… didn’t.
The End
All hail stupid people! Without them it would be impossible to realize sizable gains in the stock market! Keep panicking whenever J.P. Morgan makes a slight downward correction to their yearly outlook! Your behavior in these situations has literally been termed “herding”! Like cattle! Don’t be bothered by this, and definitely don’t look up during the next rainstorm, because I can’t have you drowning on account of your own lusterless curiosity! I need you alive and moderately liquid during the next bear market so I can stay on pace to retire early!
But really, making the first layer on your cinematic canvas “abject stupidity and/or crazy” and then building from there is an absolutely viable and delightful way to go about crafting a story. It’s only really a flawed approach when you do the opposite and attempt to make an otherwise bland story like, so edgy man by drizzling nihilism-as-humor over the top of it (or, as it’s also known, Zack Snyder-ing). And there’s no rule that says unintelligent characters must be the sole purvey of dark comedies! Dumb runs strong on the respectable side of cinema, too. On the Waterfront, one of the greatest dramas ever filmed, features a protagonist whose defining characteristic is that he’s a dumb brute, and watching him awkwardly try to fit the mold of a hero when he’s clearly built to be a henchman at best constitutes the single most fascinating element of the whole damn film!
If it seems like I’m harping a lot on dumb as a storytelling convention it’s because I am, and it’s because I miss that wonderfully rubbery approach to storytelling. Like the spoof, or any movie with a budget higher than a car commercial but lower than the yearly maintenance cost of the International Space Station I’ve mostly had to accept in recent years that Dumb, But Cleverly Implemented was mostly extinct, coopted into the Zack Snyder Head Canon, in which stupid became little more than further ammunition in that man’s endlessly bizarre vision for the world. But cue the fanfare, and ideally have it played by kazoos, or at least an entire string section that is laughably out of tune, and maybe throw in a goddamn slide whistle while you’re at it, because for ninety wonderful minutes Villains reminds us all how smart dumb can be. It’s something we should all be grateful for. I know I am.
Happy Thanksgiving, you fucks!