Red White & Blue

I have to say that this movie grew on me after I watched it... mainly because I watched it with wrong expectation. In comparison to Rumleys last movie "The living and the dead" it doesn't catch you with visual and sound effects and its not revenge movie either. "Red white and blue" is a pretty bleak drama that for most of its time focuses on showing the lives of three characters. The focus is on the characters and there is not much do distract from them except for the strange time skips in editing which at first annoyed be but have a more than logical reason in the movie. Everything relies heavily on the actors and I think for an independent movie they made quite an effort here.

Rumley denies painting anyone in this movie good or bad. You have to watch an endless spiral of pain and wrongs that never seem to make a right but there is always a reason for actions that on first sight might seem illogical. The way the characters are interwoven and the similarities between them are slowly coming to light while the plot turns into a revenge movie culminating in some pretty drastic measures is brilliant. The movie is gritty and brutal in parts but I think Rumley managed to play these elements in a way that works psychologically and not visually. The way the story is told is excellent and the finale is not a lame twist that turns everything upside down but makes you realize you have been watching a revenge movie from the first frame onwards. I think Rumley put a lot of thought into this movie and it deserves that people sit down and take a little time to think about it too.

Emily (Amanda Fuller) is a drifting through life soul, who fills in the void of her existence by having sex with pretty much any guy she meets. She strikes up a hesitant platonic friendship with Nate (Noah Taylor), a psychopathic Iraq war veteran. Nate doesn't seem too pushed on laying her, and seems to prefer to regale her with left field tales of him torturing animals as a psychopathic kid.

Franki (The Lost's Marc Senter) is a rather immature musician, with dreams of making it big, all the while caring for his cancer stricken mother. A drunken encounter with Emily will set off an event which will have horrific consequences for them both. This in turn will trigger off a horrible, brutal and uncompromising revenge...

Unfortunately, I can't reveal anything else about this film without spoiling things, as it takes time to get to its revelation. Red White And Blue is a very slow burning character study piece, which makes its third act all the more shocking. This is NOT an exploitation flick, and any fans of exploitation revenge films should very much bear this in mind, as the film takes over an hour to setup the circumstances for its revenge payoff. However, it's a damn good film in its own right, with excellent performances all around, and an unusual outlook on its characters.

Emily for example is at least partly at fault for the consequences which effect her, and Franki is no typical screen villain here, but is rather a likable everyman. Nate, while clearly a psychopath is however in no way proactively aggressive, and basically nobody concerned fills in the required role one would expect for revenge films. Basically, it's an art-house film as far as I'm concerned, but it works.

The film itself looks great, with the first slow burning half consisting of bus stops, blue collar lunch areas and seedy looking dodgy bars, and it has a nicely gritty warts n all white trash vibe to it.

Again, fans of exploitation or shallow revenge films, take note, as this will not be what you're expecting, particularly from its misleading youtube trailer, but my advice is to stick it through, as it's a great revenge film, and a great film in its own right, that manages to shock in its third act via its sheer uncompromising nature

7/10. Won't be to everyone's tastes but I personally quite liked it, and anyone who liked Shane Meadows Dead Man's Shoes should find much to like here.

If you turn away from the movie after the very hard and maybe even too explicit (though it really isn't, but it feels like it is) beginning, you will miss out on the why. You won't be able to see where the director wanted to take this. And it would be a shame. This is as "down and dirty" as a movie can go. From cinematography, acting and story/character (development).

It might not be your cup of tea of course (nothing glossy to be found here), but if you let yourself into the story and the characters (with all their flaws, of whom they have many), then you will be rewarded with a very weird and angry story. It won't pull any punches either (whether you like that or not) and stays true to it's grittiness throughout. One of the better movies I watched in 2010 (and I watched quite a few)

That's what this movie is: torture porn. True, the first two thirds of the movie are your basic indie flick about lost, tormented souls trying to find comfort on each other, or in the most desperate acts. Nothing spectacular, nothing new, but more or less well done. And completely irrelevant. Nothing of the character's dramas is left when things start rolling.

The last half an hour is obviously what the director intended to leave in our memories. And it is pure gratuitous exploitation. The viewer is just being thrown from one torture scene to another, expecting the level of violence to keep increasing(and believe me, it does). When the last confrontation between two characters is about to begin, all the viewer can think is how graphic and sickening it is going to be: no emotional tension is expected, and none is given. The fact that the violent third act takes much less time than the drama doesn't change the fact that it is the violent stuff that Red White and Blue is about.

It is obviously not a case of a movie becoming something else in the end. What happens is precisely the opposite: the long set-up is just an excuse for sickening stuff at the end. That will give the horror fans a chance to say they enjoyed a film with character development, and that they are not just fans of the gross stuff, etc. Pure BS. This is as much an exploitation film as I Spit in Your Grave, Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left and the like. Yes, I am degrading this movie from its artsy pretensions to the genre it really belongs. You make enjoy this if you are a horror fan, but don't fool yourself.

This film reminded me mostly of Audition and how the mood changes from drama to sinister to disturbing.

The film follows the sexual goings-on of a young girl named Erica, who we believe to be troubled in some way or another. She has a friend, Nate, in whom she can confide and who appears to be genuinely concerned for her. A side-plot, about a semi-successful garage-band, runs in parallel from the point they all get in the sack with Erica, on a drunken band team-building exercise. These two plot lines come slamming back together in a big way, just after the middle of the movie.

Once this film gets going, it really grabs hold of you and doesn't let go, until after the gut-wrenching climax. The build-up is slow paced but justifiably so, as it needs to bring true depth to the characters, otherwise the latter half of the story wouldn't work.

Unlike movies where the good and bad guys are clear cut, this one really blurs the edges, so that we're never quite sure who's in the right and who's not. I'm saying this is a good thing for this movie, because it really makes the viewer question the morality in each scene and find it harder to predict where the movie us is ultimately heading.

There's little I would criticise. What it does, it does very well - all credit to the director and cast.

I wouldn't categorise this as a horror (unless we count Franki's earrings), it's more of an intense drama/thriller but Red White and Blue is one of the best films I have seen this year and would recommend it to anyone who has the stomach for this sort of thing.