Red State

RED STATE

Written & Directed by Kevin Smith

Starring Michael Parks, John Goodman, Melissa Leo

This is a strange move for Kevin Smith. Best known for portraying Silent Bob in his bizarre (and hilarious) stoner comedies, Smith has always stayed within his genre and enjoyed both cult and mainstream success. With Red State, he's changing his game, employing a mix of satire and serious shock to drive home a point. He's never been one for subtlety, however, which is not only supremely evident in this film but detrimental - driving home a point only works if you know what the point is.

Red State begins with three horny teenagers looking to get off. The boys arrange a casual group sex meet on a Blendr-styled phone app with a thirty-eight year old woman, and drive out to meet her, but find themselves taken captive by a fundamentalist church sect with more than preaching on their minds.

Not much more, mind you. It's clear from the first sequence inside the Five Points Trinity Church that Smith is all too enamoured with his villain, Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), who spends what must be ten minutes of screen time sermonising about the evils of queers and modern America. He is a monster, that much is clear, a logical step-too-far from the Phelps family patron and the real Westboro Baptist Church. It's a very good performance, but one that becomes all too one-note as the film progresses. We get what his deal is two minutes in, but he just ploughs on regardless. The speeches are full of rhetoric that is neither florid nor engaging, just mental.

As for the 'protagonists', their motivation at the start is 'pussy', dealt with using the standard pointless, repetitive dialogue about bitches and tits. It's all so laughably cliched as to almost avoid being offensive, but enough to make me itch for them to croak, if indeed this was that kind of movie.

And it is. Once the body count starts, it doesn't stop, and Smith is quite good at catching you by surprise with the death scenes. It's a display of real flair that leads him to annihilate people you think are the point of focus.

It's here we run into problems, however. There is no point of focus. The film begins by saying "the church is screwed up", then it changes shirts halfway through to one reading "the government is screwed up". By the end, I hardly knew which flag the film was waving, and it didn't feel right. Everyone is at fault, and everyone is held accountable. These grey shades are something I usually love, but here they felt hackneyed and blurry.

There are some scenes and lines I loved, and the cinematography was at times eye-catching, but neither satisfied throughout. Smith likes explaining things through phone calls - a basic no-no in any screenwriting class, as there's no visual appeal or character interplay. John Goodman is, of course, great, but he doesn't have much to work with here. It's as if Kevin was too surprised at the cast he assembled to actually allow the story to breathe around their mugshots.

It's not a bad start as far as the genre goes, but one would expect an experienced director like Smith to rope a narrative together with a little more class and less exposition. Red State needs to learn from its own antagonist - sermonizing gets you nowhere.