JohnFilmfreak

I finally decided to waste some time on this, and can confirm that it's bad. Only, probably not in the way you'd think.

Because what we've got here is actually not so much a movie, as a filmed stage play, where everything happens inside a small apartment and a handful of characters go in and out of doors. It's clearly a zero-budget production, with everything feeling cramped, improvised and shot in one take just to get it over with.

It's also not the "black comedy" it's advertised as. At least, I couldn't find anything funny about it, black or otherwise. Instead, it's a straight drama that tries to be an existential character study about guilt, identity and self-worth, but ends up as a tedious exercise in watching unlikable people talk in circles. Whatever depth it's aiming for is buried under clumsy dialogue, awkward pacing and the kind of amateurish, on-the-nose writing that intentionally leans on cringiness as a stylistic choice.

And finally, contrary to what the title might have you expect, there's nothing really racist about it. Instead, it's about a man confronting his own insecurities about race. And as such, ironically, the people most likely to be triggered by the title, are probably exactly the people who might actually get some sort of enjoyment out of this sludge.

About 90% of this film is the main character walking down the street. He goes here and there, occasionally talking to various people in conversations that's never given as much screentime as the shots of him getting there by foot. The actual plot could have been cut down to a 15 minute short, but instead it's padded worse than the main character's leather jacket.

Maybe it's supposed to be a metaphor for the guy always being on his way to somewhere he'll never arrive. Or maybe, more probably, it's just terrible filmmaking that practically screams of student production from a director who thinks it's important to show where the protagonist is going, every foot of the way.

It's rather ironic that a documentary which does nothing but praise filmmaking skills, is itself so sloppily thrown together. Because the editing and sound design of this thing is so bad, it had me shouting obscenities at the screen.

Some of the interviews are somewhat interesting, but the documentarians do their best to utterly ruin whatever the talking heads convey, as they cut each interview into tiny pieces and seemingly just scatter them about haphazardly, slicing off people in the midst of sentences and applying jarring sound effects to boot.

The result is pretty much an insult to both Sam Raimi and his fans.