Red State

Red State (2011)

58% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 84 reviews)

Runtime: 88 minutes

Directed by: Kevin Smith

Starring: Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Michael Angarano

From: The Harvey Boys

Boy, did I ever go from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows when it comes to movie-watching, and all in the span of a little more than 24 hours. I did not enjoy watching this film, and I swear its badness bled over into today, which was a crappy day overall AND I have an upset stomach so there won't be any movie-watching and I'll have to return Friday night instead of tomorrow night. Alas... here's the Letterboxd review:

Oh, this movie...

Ever since this came out this is like a typical Kevin Smith movie from the past 10 years and like the man himself, it riles up people in an incredible way and it's incredibly polarizing. Me, I pretty much avoid watching Kevin Smith movies; I don't hate them all... one day I need to watch the ones I actually enjoy for this site; you know, like the Clerks films or Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Before this the newest one I saw was Cop Out... well, technically it was so awful and Tracy Morgan was the most noxious entity in human history I could only watch the first 15 minutes before turning it off in disgust but maybe I should try and stomach the movie in full so I can rip it apart here on this site like I am going to with this pathetic excuse for a motion picture.

I knew I was in trouble only a few minutes into the picture when I saw that the three teenage males that are the de facto protagonists of the picture are actually asstagonists of the highest order; I mean, they're absolutely awful human beings and they drop the F bomb CONSTANTLY and it didn't take long before I hated the movie right from that point. Other characters doing the same thing and dropping the F bomb every fourth word didn't improve my mood.

Maybe it'd improve once they got those boys to the evil compound of the group that's like the Westboro Baptist Church. Oh no! Not only do I still do not get why exactly those boys were targeted by the Five Points Trinity Church (and this is after looking at a few different sites-including Wikipedia-to try and find an answer) but what the church does is utterly preposterous and never believable at all. Plus, the movie thinks that having their leader Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) babble on incessantly was a good move. No. Less is more, and what he says is not something like what you'd hear in a Tarantino film, where I could excuse long monologues because they're interesting or they're important to the plot; needless to say Kevin Smith is not QT.

Much of the film: people being complete A-holes yelling at each other, incoherent shaky-cam action scenes, not a lot of horror (that was the only reason why I finally gave it a chance via a late-night cable viewing last night) and worst of all, just about everyone is a despicable character and those that are not... brutally nihilistic things happen to them, which isn't an automatic turn-off for me but the way it's done here... what a thoroughly unpleasant and atrocious movie this is; what was the point and what was Kevin Smith trying to say here? I have no idea! It was an awful story filled with awful people and it's filled with stupid nonsensical contrivance after stupid nonsensical contrivance.

It's just inept and I usually don't think this way when I disagree with a lot of people on this site, but I honestly can not comprehend at all why this has so many positive highly-rated reviews. I just don't get it. This was so bad, I am honestly just done with that pot-smoking lazy idiot Kevin Smith, who refuses to improve from his student film days and thinks it's OK to do things in a crude way because it worked with Clerks 20 years ago. I certainly am not going to watch Tusk if it's filled with so much ugliness like this was, and I really wish he would have stuck with one of the 10 or so retirement announcements he's made throughout the years and just do podcasts for his small fanbase.