The Boondock Saints

Message:  God loves a vigilante.

As much as I’ve tried to not enjoy The Boondock Saints for pure entertainment, I can’t stop myself: it’s an incredibly well structured, exciting, fun vigilante flick – perhaps the best ever made.

The problem, of course, is that Saints includes none of the (however minute) moral ambiguity found in flicks like Death Wish, instead opting for one of the most simplistic, immature, highly illogical senses of morality. Up until the end of the film, the viewer is more or less allowed to draw his own conclusions as to the morality of the brothers’ actions; as far as the audience knows, these two guys are just lucky, enthusiastic vigilantes with an intense passion to kill everyone they find “evil.” At the climax, however, we find that Il Duce (the assassin sent to kill the brothers earlier in the film) is, in fact, their father, thus explaining why all three combatants miraculously escaped an earlier fight with mere flesh wounds: God, it turns out, was watching over them.

By making the boys’ vigilantism divinely sanctioned, the film forces an opinion onto the viewer: you can’t disagree with what the boys do anymore, because you’d be disagreeing with God (which obviously makes you wrong). I’d even be willing to accept the illogical Sin Bin scene (thanks to the omission of an expository  scene, the brothers murder a couple of guys for no reason whatsoever other than somehow knowing that they’re evil), the over-the-top evilness of every bad guy in the film, and the otherwise simplistic sense of good and evil the film puts forward were it not for the fact that Saints wraps the whole thing up with a nice “God kept the Saints from killing each other so they could save the world” message.

You know, serial killers also tend to think God is talking to them, or looking out for them. Just throwing them out there.

Shaun of the Dead

Message:  Shaun tries real hard to save his friends and get Liz back, and that’s what matters.

At the end of the flick, Shaun and Liz are back together, and thanks to Shaun’s new zombie-inspired proactive attitude, he’s got a new strength in life. If he hadn’t left his flat to save Liz, he wouldn’t have gotten back with her and he’d still be a loser with a dead-end job.

Save for, you know, the fact that Shaun basically got his mother, father, and three best friends killed. If he hadn’t left his flat in the first place, David and Diane and Liz would have stayed in theirs, Ed would never have gotten bitten, and his mother wouldn’t have gotten chomped by a rogue zombie -- though admittedly, considering her husband was bitten she probably would have gotten eaten anyway.  Still, though, David, Diane, and Ed would have been perfectly fine.

I’m all for love and getting your girlfriend back and everything, but is that really worth the deaths of all your friends? Really?

Bros before hos, Shaun. Bros before hos. 

Rio Bravo

Message: Real men kill gangloads of men without asking for help.

Rio Bravo was made as Howard Hawks’ testosterone-driven answer to High Noon, so it’s not particularly surprising that the entire (insanely fun, entertaining, well-acted) film is full of gung-ho John Wayne bullshit. High Noon  was about a good man finding out that the people he protects are actually not worth protecting once he asks them for help. Rio Bravo is just about badass men redeeming themselves and doing badass things.

Rio Bravo exists within the fantastic, somewhat BS west of the imagination, where good is always rewarded, bad is always punished, good guys are individualistic hardasses and the bad guys are real bad. High Noon deals with cowardice, moral ambiguity, and the definition of heroism. Rio Bravo’s messages aren’t outright wrong so much as they are totally inferior to the ones put forth by High Noon a few years earlier.

A Clockwork Orange

Message: True evil lives eternal.

I didn’t really have a problem with the ending of A Clockwork Orange the first time I saw it, not having read the novel upon which it was based. Alex DeLarge’s conditioning is undone by his jump out of a two-story window, he’s able to fantasize about rape and violence once again, and he’s right back where he started.

This kinda defeats the point, really. If the film is attempting to say that forced morality is no morality at all, then it’d be nice if it could at least offer up some evidence that, once the conditioning wears off, Alex is at least marginally capable of acting like a normal human being. As it stands, the film (rather sinisterly) suggests that it’s wrong to brainwash him into being unable to commit crime because it takes away his freedom, and that once he regains his ability to commit evil he has somehow won a victory – as if his ability to rape and kill once again is better than being forced to commit good, despite the fact that he will undoubtedly return to his old, violence habits.

Anthony Burgess was quite understandably pissed at Kubrick’s ending, because it dropped the final (and most important) chapter of the book where Alex realizes that most of his friends have either died or been imprisoned, and that, through maturity, he has lost his taste for ultraviolence and a bit of the old in-out. Burgess’ book suggests that Alex could have reformed on his own, or with compassionate rehabilitation (thus making his brainwashing that much more sinister); the film says that Alex will always be evil, but that this is somehow a good thing simply because he’s escaped the power of the government.

Burgess was trying to say something about human nature. Kubrick was trying to be cheeky.

Forrest Gump

Message: Follow what others tell you and you’ll live a really kickass life.

Forrest Gump’s presumed theme is that so long as a complete innocent lives his life by a set of core moral rules, he can eventually become a better, happier, and more successful person than the rest of us “intelligent” people who seem to be so goddamn miserable all the time.

The problem, of course, is that Forrest Gump never really does anything of his own free will. He listens to his momma, Jenny, Lieutenant Dan, and Bubba, but (apart from the scene where he runs back to find and rescue Bubba) he never actually shows any initiative or decision-making capabilities of his own. Jenny tells him to run, so he runs. The government tells him to fight, so he fights. Forrest is a pure, wonderful soul, but were it not for his supernatural speed and ability to play ping pong, he’d have gotten killed or screwed over roughly a hundred times over throughout the course of his life.

Forrest Gump is a heartwarming, moving story of America from the perspective of a complete innocent, but it doesn’t work too well as a morality tale.

Dogma

Message: God exists, and she’s awesome!

I hesitate to call Dogma a “great” film, or even a particularly good one – I stopped enjoying Kevin Smith’s stuff once I turned about 17 – but Dogma still ranks among Smiths’ best and I used to really enjoy it.

Essentially, the entire film leads up to one confrontation with God (played by Alanis Morissette), who kills Ben Affleck (no complaints here), cleans up the immediate area, and makes a little joke before heading back to the heavens. Every character is touched or moved or made somehow better by meeting God – which really doesn’t make sense, considering how much of a dick she seems to be.

Firstly, Bartleby and Loki cannot get into heaven because if they do, they’ll be breaking the one unbreakable rule of the universe: God is infallible. Without getting into a long discussion about how not perfect the world is, what kind of a douchebag deity creates a universe where she cannot possibly be wrong under any circumstances – especially when the film alludes to the fact that she may have been needlessly merciless in ordering Bartleby and Loki to wipe sinners out in the first place? This is typically where one would put a sexist joke, so – to save us both some time – pretend I did.

Secondly, neither God nor the film take a definite stance on the massacre at the very end of the film: Bartleby and Loki kill literally everyone in attendance for the plenary indulgence ceremony, reporters and priests and churchgoers alike, and then God shows up and gets rid of the bodies, but what then? Are those people still dead, because God felt they were “sinners,” somehow, and deserved to die? Or did they wake up back at home as if nothing had happened? Neither God, nor Smith seem to think this question really deserves an answer – whether we’re talking about abysmal storytelling or an intensely assholish God, the film’s refusal to explain this scene really messes with its ultimate message.