BenGW1

I gave SUMMER JOB a 5 out of 10. An explanation is surely in order, because I happen to think this is a bad movie: a comedy without many jokes, written and directed on a level that would need more work to pass muster in a high-school film studies class.

Yet a 5 it gets. Why? Because SUMMER JOB was one of the first T&A comedies I ever rented at Blockbuster (I didn't rent all of the other ones, just some of them) and even though it was stupid, it was also harmless, had the "good people" winning out at the end over the jackasses and witches, and didn't have pretensions of being more than it was. In fact, the movie's stupidity made it more, not less, fun.

This video probably won't be available--to the extent it's really widely available--once video stores start following Blockbuster's lead and replacing VCR tapes with DVDs, so I wanted to say my peace on it before it disappears, for a movie that is bad yet not easy to forget, try as one might.

This is the kind of film that people will either love or hate, because it's relentless in the downward spiral of death and human ugliness that it portrays. I don't think many folks would want to watch something like this in the post-9/11 world, but then again, TRAINING DAY is just as nihilistic as this movie and it made over $24 million in its first weekend.

The key to VERY BAD THINGS are in the characters of Robert Boyd, played by Christian Slater, and Kyle Fisher, played by Jon Favreau. They're the opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil, except that Kyle isn't as purely good as Boyd is flat-out horrible. Boyd's the consummate supressed control/rage freak and it isn't an accident that he's not only not that bothered by the two deaths and one murder in Las Vegas, but relishes the opportunity to commit more of them. Kyle may be horrified at what's happened but he has the strange ability to internalize it, unlike the poor Berkow brothers and even Charles the mechanic. As played by the vastly underrated Leland Orser, Charles is great at showing us how a quiet, vacant fellow would react to this cavalcade of disaster (he reminded me of the Tobias Beecher character on OZ).

The best or worst thing about this film, from an honesty standpoint, is that it hates everyone it sees and isn't afraid to say it. VERY BAD THINGS has vile portrayals of women, Cameron Diaz as a harridan whose final fate was darkly amusing, and Jeanne Tripplehorn is simply pathetic. The characters in the movie are also racist and anti-Semitic, but it's unclear to what effect that is being presented. Would they have not killed the security guard if he'd been white? Is there any reason to point out that the Berkow brothers are Jewish and have at least some insight into Jewish law and customs, beyond setting up Boyd's cruel comments to them and the disastrous funeral reception? No one in the movie is that nice, but there is some sympathy for Kyle and Daniel Stern's character, because they might have had OK lives if this hadn't happened (or would have deluded themselves into thinking their lives were happy). Everyone else here was headed for hell on earth anyway, I thought, and the events here just accelerated that process.

Yet for all its nastiness and ugliness, this is also a very well-made film, the plotting is relentlessly ingenious, and it's one of the few films that plays better in an edited form without being neutered. I saw it on Comedy Central, where the most gruesome violence (like the chainsaw scene) was cut out and the language was dubbed (though you'd have to be clueless to not get what was REALLY being said). It worked on its chosen level, as a nihilistic and cruel comedy. I didn't much enjoy this film but I had to grade it on what it did, not how it did it. Like a great critic once said, not every good film is fun.

Well, Khan from TV's KING OF THE HILL never says that line in ASSASSINS, but he could have. This is a long, slow, boring film. Even sequences that are supposed to be exciting--such as a part where Stallone retrieves a briefcase from an elevated train in Seattle, then has to get rid of it in a hurry--are just there. There's no energy here. Sylvester Stallone does a very good job showing a hitman who's life energy has been destroyed by his career, but unfortunately his character's weariness mirrors the film's. We aren't any more enthused by what he's going through than he is.

What's interesting, and a little strange, is that this movie was written by the Wachowski Brothers, who went on to write and direct THE MATRIX. The strange part is that the structure of these two movies, this one and MATRIX, isn't all that different: several intense action sequences bracketed by a large amount of exposition. It's more what's done with it than what it is, though, so ASSASSINS has unexciting action with uninteresting dialogue compared to THE MATRIX.

And for the goofs section, the Nicolai character says he had to fake his death in 1980 because the Cold War was coming to an end. Whatever events were happening in 1980, the Cold War's imminent end wasn't one of them.