Paint It Blecch
My thoughts on The Crusades, Insidious: The Red Door, Scarlet and Sound of Freedom
The Crusades is a film so gross, stupid and reprehensible that the only thing outside of professional obligation that kept me from turning it off long before the end was a fervent hope that there would be something in the ending that might somehow justify all the preceding loathsomeness—something along the lines of Jason Voorhees making a surprise appearance to transform the central characters into something resembling grape jelly with his machete. Here is a film in which the opening sequence revolves around an after-school brawl between a borderline-psychotic kid and a deaf student from a rival school who is constantly referred to as being “handicapped” and it turns out that the aggro kid (who mercifully does get his ass kicked) is supposed to be one of the three heroes of the story. This is Jack (Ryan Ashton) and after that opening, which should send most sensible people scurrying for the aisles, he and pals Leo (Rudy Pankow) and Sean (Khalil Everage) learn that the all-boys Catholic school they attend, Our Lady of the Crusades, is about to merge with hated rival inner-city school St. Matthews. The film follows them on their various misadventures during the weekend before the merger is to be voted on, during which Jack veers between brutal rage and worry that the merger will mean his expulsion, Sean deals with a girlfriend (Indiana Massara) who is upset that he would rather spend time with his boys than having sex with her, Leo smugly goes about trying to get the school’s hottie Italian teacher (Anna Maiche) into bed and the three find themselves constantly trying to avoid getting caught by a roving gang of St. Matthews students who are, if possible, even more psychotic than they are.
I do not object to the fact that director Leo Milano and co-writers Shaun Early and Jack Hussar—three friends whose own experiences growing up in the Northwest Chicago suburbs of Niles and Glenview reportedly served as the film’s inspiration—have set out to make an unapologetically rude and allegedly outrageous teen comedy. No, I object to the fact that they have made such a poor example of them here. Although it clearly would like to be compared to the likes of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the various John Hughes nightmares, the closest thing I can compare it to is the infamous classic Porky’s. Both films share a similar crudeness (both in terms of humor and cinematic style), both have an icky attitude towards their female characters and anything hinting of sane and sensible sexuality and, most important, both feature obnoxious and utterly unlikable characters—the kind who would be the hated bullies in most other films of this kind—as our ostensible heroes. The whole film is such a ghastly and unironic celebration of toxic masculinity at its most juvenile that you get the sense that those past experiences of Milano, Early and Hussar consisted entirely of sitting by themselves in a basement every weekend of high school to repeatedly watch and misunderstand Fight Club. The result is so bad that not only would I happily choose to watch Porky’s again over The Crusades if I had to pick between the two, I would happily throw Porky’s Revenge into the mix as well.
Insidious: The Red Door finds its two main characters, Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and college-age son Dalton (Ty Simpkins), struggling mightily to recall their long-buried memories of the terrors that befell them a decade earlier—a sensation probably shared by much of the audience, who probably remember the reasonably effective 2010 original but are much fuzzier on the 2013 follow up and may not even remember that there were two additional installments in 2015 and 2018 that are evidently completely ignored here. In those first two films, it transpired that the two had the ability to projects their spirits across the astral plane—known here as the Further—which had the unfortunate side effect of riling up malevolent spirits hellbent on possessing their bodies for the usual unspeakable reasons. At the conclusion of the second one, the two were put under deep hypnosis so that they would forget that they had these abilities and lead peaceful lives. As unfortunate side effects, Josh is suffering from a constant brain fog that has caused him to divorce wife Renai (Rose Byrne) and Dalton has become a sullen art student heading off to college. Challenged by his art teacher to plumb his subconscious for inspiration, Dalton begins painting an eerie red door and, with the help of spunky dorm mate Chris (Sinclair Daniel) becomes obsessed with unlocking its meaning. Meanwhile, Josh, reeling from the recent death of his mother, tries to get to the bottom of his own psychological issues and makes some startling discoveries of his own that finding him drifting back towards the Further and the horrors is contains.
At least I think that is the basic plot—as it unfolds over a running time that clocks in at about 90 minutes and feels about four times longer, both the screenplay by Leigh Whannell and Scott Teems and Wilson’s direction (his debut in that capacity) prove to be as murky as the film’s almost literally unwatchable visual style. Like so many horror movies of late, the story proves to be yet another metaphor with coming to terms with buried emotional trauma but adds nothing of consequence to that increasingly tiresome trope—the whole thing is little more than a rendition of Cat’s in the Cradle with slightly more projectile vomiting than that song typically inspires. Although Wilson does manage to generate a couple of decent jump scares—the best one occurring when his character is stuck in an MRI machine—he has no idea of how to generate anything resembling suspense. The human element is also sorely lacking due to the generally awkward performances—while Byrne only briefly turns up in an appearance that lands somewhere between being a good sport and contractual obligation, Wilson essentially sleepwalks through his part, Daniel tries way too hard to be the spark of life and Simpkins is so annoyingly dull that you actually wish that he would become possessed, preferably by something with a personality. Approximately as terrifying and dramatically propulsive as a busted lava lamp, Insidious: The Red Door is an exercise in pure tedium whose sole saving grace is that it should nail the lid on the coffin of any further Further tales.
Scarlet is a film that is so full of visual splendor and ambition on the part of director/co-writer Pietro Marcello that I genuinely wish that I liked it more than I actually did. Tenuously based on the 1923 Alexander Grin novel Scarlet Sails, it tells a tale that spans 20 years and begins with woodworker Raphael (Raphael Thierry) returning home after serving in World War I to a small village in the north of France, only to discover that his wife died while giving birth to their daughter, Juliette. The infant child has been cared for by a neighbor, Madam Adeline (Noemie Lvovsky) and the three begin to form a bond between them that is able to survive rumors regarding the circumstances of Marie’s death that have made both Raphael and Juliette virtual pariahs among the locals. The film then jumps ahead to focus on the now-adult Juliette (Juliette Jouan) and her growing frustrations with provincial life that she occasionally voices through song.
The early scenes, featuring Raphael’s uneasy reintegration to his hometown and the development of his unshakable love for his daughter, are easily the best as Marcello does such a convincing job of introducing and developing both the characters and the community that it at times has the enveloping feeling of a documentary (a sensation further bolstered by the striking 16mm cinematography from Marco Graziaplena). However, once the film shifts its focus about a third of the way in from Raphael to Juliette and begins indulging in more whimsical ideas—including several songs, animation and elements of magic realism), it starts to lose its way. Although Jouan remains a striking presence throughout, the film never really seems to have a handle on her dissatisfaction with her surroundings and her desire to leave and one diversion—a bit in which she falls in love with a pilot (Louis Garrel) who suddenly appears into her life and then just as suddenly disappears—is handled in such an abrupt manner that you wonder why it was included in the first place. (The sequence feels like a bizarre homage to Emmanuelle 2, sans the Good Parts.) I cannot recommend Scarlet—it is just too rambling and diffuse for its own good—but it is always nice to look at and contains just enough intrigue to keep you watching in the hope—ultimately in vain—that it will somehow pull itself together into something genuinely meaningful and inspired.
Sound of Freedom is a mostly gross action-drama that takes an undeniably serious and heart-wrenching topic—the horror of child sex trafficking—and transforms it into a largely lunkheaded celebration of vigilantism in general and a veneration of Tim Ballard, the real-life person whose story is recounted here. As depicted here, Ballard (Jim Caviezel) is a former CIA operative-turned-Homeland Security agent who specializes in cases involving child sex trafficking who is nevertheless distressed that while he is more than capable of getting traffickers arrested, he isn’t able to actually free children and return them to their families. After a new case allows him to actually free Miguel (Lucas Avila), a boy kidnapped from his father in Honduras by a group of predators posing as entertainment agents, he learns that the boy’s sister, Rocio (Cristal Aparicio), is still out there. Vowing to Miguel that he will rescue Rocio, he takes off to Colombia in search of the girl and meets up with Vampiro (Bill Camp), a local who has decided to break up the local child sex industry, after having sampled, allegedly inadvertently, it for himself. The two decide to set up a sting operation involving the construction of an elaborate sex hotel catering to pedophiles in the hopes of luring the people who took Rocio and when Ballard’s boss (Kurt Fuller) orders him to stop everything and come home, he is so consumed with his quest to rescue kids that he quits his job and continues on his mission on his own.
In most respects, Sound of Freedom is vulgar garbage—essentially the cinematic equivalent of someone on Twitter who responds to any argument by calling the other person a “pedo.” The film is an unabashed celebration of Ballard and his somewhat dubious methods that comes across as heavy-handed even if you didn’t already know that there have been many questions surrounding Ballard’s personal history, methods and rate of success. (Of course, none of those potentially divisive elements are even hinted at here.) To load the deck even further, the film casts none other that an actor best known for playing Jesus Christ as Ballard, a move that will presumably delight the conservative audiences that the film is aiming for but does little else—he tries to employ an Eastwood-like growl and steely demeanor throughout that never quite convinces. The film is also a bit of a mess at times—you get the sense that numerous scenes were shot and then deleted without covering up the resulting gaps. (This is most evident in regards to the character of Ballard’s dutiful wife, who is played her by Mira Sorvino in a role so brief and pointless that to call it a cameo would give it more substance than it has.) And yet, while the film as a whole is eventually kind of tiresome—especially towards the end as it becomes an increasingly unbelievable hybrid of Rambo and Hardcore—the scenes involving the two kids are undeniably effective and do a good job of conveying the horrors that their characters are enduring without veering into sheer exploitation. As Caviezel himself states during a long and odd speech that plays during the end credits, the point of Sound of Freedom is to get the word out to audiences about the expansive horrors of child sex trafficking—this is a noble and worthy message, of course, but one deserving of a much better delivery system than this.