This is going to have spoilers. There’s no way for me to truly express exactly how I feel about Red State without talking about the last ten minutes. Seeing as how the film is widely available for rental on OnDemand services including iTunes (although it does come with a full price movie ticket fee), you should probably go see it before reading my diatribe on how it has one of the biggest missed opportunities in recent film history.
Kevin Smith truly has broken away from his conventional film making style. While Red State does contain jokes, it is a dark and twisted story about religion, hate, government and terrorism. Red State kicks off as a story about three boys from a backwards hick town wanting to get laid. The leads here is Travis played by Michael Angarano and his friend Jarod played by Kyle Gallner. They bring around their friend Billy-Ray played by Nicholas Braun who has such a beautiful mullet that I was taken aback by it.
Finding a strange woman on a hook up site who demands that she sleep with all of them at the same time or none of them at all, they embark on late night drive where they scrape by a Sheriff who’s partaking in some homosexual activity which eventually brings on the entire action centric portion of the film.
Turns out the boys were brought to this backwards town of Cooper’s Dell in order to be drugged, kidnapped, put on display and killed as an example of what God hates in America. This starts with the brutal execution of homosexual and only gets crazier from there. It isn’t long before the Sheriff sends out his deputy to find the car that dinged up his which brings him to the Five Points compound where our three horny teenagers are being kept hostage.
This is when everything gets a little crazy. Leading the church which happens to be his whole family is Michael Park’s Abin Cooper. Cooper preaches fire and brimstone, blames homosexuality for ruining america and the media and is clearly crazy. His preaching is well acted but the words are forgettable. I buy Michael Parks in the part of Abin Cooper but something about the dialog here felt forced, rambled on for far too long. Maybe it’s my natural hatred of this kind of person that kept me from soaking it is, but I just didn’t absorb what he was saying at all.
It isn’t long before the ATF is called in John Goodman saves the entire film as Agent Joseph Keenan. Goodman plays a middle ranking officer who’s given an impossible task and it’s believable. He’s put into one of the shittiest situations anyone could every be in, and his superiors are telling him to do something he doesn’t agree with. They’re placing on his shoulders the responsibility of killing everyone in this compound and keeping the media out of it. Around the middle act of the film it becomes clear that Goodman is actually the central character and that the three boys aren’t really all that important. They’re either dead by the center of the film or off screen so much that they simply do not matter.
Goodman drives the rest of the film, but it’s a shame he doesn’t get any time with Abin Cooper. Your protagonists and antagonists share no time together. All the action in the film is done from either sides of a giant wall and bullets are traded back and forth four the last third of the movie with certain characters who aren’t important are killed until an event happens that could have been the most brilliant way to finish the film… and then doesn’t.
Just as the Cooper gang are about to make their last stand and the ATF has broken the fence line, and are pushing in with guns blazing (killing off Kevin Smith’s wife in the process) a miracle seems to happen putting a halt to the action. A horn sounds from the skies and it seems as though just maybe it’s the end of the word as written in the book of revelation. The horns from the heaven sound the end of the world as 1000 years of yadda yadda yadda. Basically it seems as though the end of the world is here, the earth is about to be punished and Jesus Christ is coming back.
The book of revelation has always been one of my favorites. It’s so crazy sounding and insane that I would LOVE for a film to actually try and interpret those ideas. I was watching this film and thinking that just for a second this could be the end of the world and Kevin Smith has elevated this film into something truly incredible where the audience is obviously on the side of the ATF, thinks these psychos are just that and then proves they’re right, God comes back and we see the end of the world take place. WRONG! Instead it turns out that the horns were a prank from some eco-hippies across the valley.
Yep. Kevin Smith writes this moment where everyone feels as though the world is going to end and then takes it from everyone and ends the film with a boring piece of dialog between John Goodman and a couple agents asking what happened. We don’t even see how this thing goes down in the end… we hear about it in a debriefing. After that we get a joke and Kevin Smith gets the last word in the film.
BUT I did enjoy Red State. It doesn’t feel like a Kevin Smith film because it’s not a comedy. It’s got humor and that humor works, but it’s mostly just a b-horror film with a few deaths and a few moments of real suspense and action and people die in realist ways. I don’t mean realistic as in how the violence is portrayed but rather people die in the film when you least expect it and the film moves on. I got the same feeling from some of the deaths as I did with some of the deaths in The Wire. They’re on screen, they happen and the people have to move on. Nobody lingers over a body.
The film doesn’t really say much about protestors as the movie is quick to say that the Coopers are NOT the Phelps and that they shouldn’t be confused. It doesn’t say much about fire arms and the second amendment either as all the shooting is started from the side of the government. In fact many of the cold blooded murders are done on the side of the ATF. In that way the film isn’t preachy. It doesn’t condemn anything, or say that any view point is right either.
I think Red State could have been better… but I’m glad I watched it, and if you’ve been a fan or Kevin Smith or followed his career you should check it out too.
