Dir: Kevin Smith
Starring: John
Goodman, Michael Parks, Melissa Leo
Kevin Smith takes a break from his usual genre of the
slacker comedy to tackle action and horror in Red State. The film begins with three teens (Michael Anagarano,
Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) in southern states America who find a woman on
the internet who will have sex with them. After travelling out to her trailer,
they are drugged and find themselves held captive in a church, about to become
the unwilling victims of a murderous sermon of the congregation of the Five
Points Church.
The film takes aim at hardcore Christian groups in America,
more specifically the Westboro Baptist Church. The religious sect is a great subject for
horror as we already think their views and actions are monstrous, and so their
murderous actions don’t seem farfetched. The film also scrutinises the
government and its policy on terrorists and the Terrorism Act, its stance on
culpability and its willingness to take lethal action when it perceives a
threat. The Waco siege of 1993 was an obvious influence on the second half of
the film. The event, in which the FBI initiated a siege on a Protestant Sect on
a ranch after being unable to execute a search warrant, which lead to 76 deaths
including children and pregnant women, is reflected in the siege upon the Five
Points ranch, the FBI in the film ordered to kill everyone including women and
children.
The film ultimately poses to us the problem of evil. Who are
the bad guys in the film? The ultra conservative Christians who are killing
people for what they believe is a God ordered purpose or the government who
kill people because they can and who cover up the whole massacre, hiding behind
legislation, and then sleeping peacefully at night?
The main problem with the film is that it does not know what
genre it wants to be. It starts off as a horror as the Christian group are
shown as righteous murders, willing to kill homosexuals and rampant fornicators
as is God’s will. The film then wildly changes tack to become a siege action
film in the vein of Assault on Precinct
13, as its focus shifts from the three terrorised teenagers, and onto
Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) and his squad of police waiting outside of the
church. The tension is never really built up in the beginning for the horror
element to work fully and though the deaths of some characters come as a
surprise at points, as the focus of the film is changed from character to
character, you never really get a sense of loss when one of them dies.
However, the film is certainly entertaining and better than
many of the leading reviews have proclaimed. It has some interesting themes and
some good performances; Michael Parks is creepily effective and convincing as a
pastor strongly attached to his religious convictions, and Goodman is always
watchable as the government official struggling between his sense of right and
wrong and his orders.
It’s good to see Smith trying something different,
especially after a recent string of poor films, even if Red State is a slight disappointment. It would be good to see him tackle different
genres more often.
4 out of 5 Buttons
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