Word: darkness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite Smith's stellar performance, the film's most interesting character is Brill, played wonderfully by Hackman. He is a dark and bitter ex-agent of the National Security Agency out for revenge against the institution that forsook him. His motivations are skewed, actions devious and intent unknown. In one moment he condemns Dean's ignorance and uselessness; in another he courageously saves Dean's life. The chemistry between Hackman and Smith is powerful, as the two reluctant heroes transform initial self-interest into teamwork. The ending is a contrived and coincidental as a novel by Charles Dickens, but does...
...about being a little rude with your cookies. My blocking group would attest that I am a nice enough guy, but taking a walnut crescent is a serious offense. Sure, the chocolate ones were for them (it must be a genetic defect, I know, but not everyone likes the dark stuff), but a misplaced finger on a raspberry square would be grounds for a hearing with the Ad Board in my book. And not a meeting over lunch either...
First of all by nothing that dark comedy is where it's at in contemporary Hollywood. The one movie in recent years that was an unqualified success, both critically and commercially, was a sort of dark comedy: Pulp Fiction. Maybe it's more profitable to compare this latest incarnation of the genre to another dark comedy, one trashed by critics and rejected by the public: The Cable Guy. Perhaps only myself and a few other moviegoers, most of them residing in attics or asylums, think that The Cable Guy was a brilliant film. Nonetheless, it's a useful point...
What The Cable Guy had, Very Bad Things lacks: a comedic actor working with disturbing material, scenes of psychological violence and moments when the veil of horror is rent, revealing dark humor underneath. What Very Bad Things has, The Cable Guy did not: an ensemble of characters who--despite including pseudo-stars like Christian Slater--never quite mesh, scenes of physical violence and moments when the superficial horror turns out to conceal nothing besides yet more superficiality. And blood. Blood, limbs and gore, in all of their nauseating variations. Here is where Very Bad Things shows itself to be neither...
...every step the director takes forward, he takes 10 back. In fact, the most obvious faults of Very Bad Things, namely its superficiality and simplicity, could be placed under the general heading of film infected by television. As with television, what is interesting and alive--here the genre of dark comedy--is co-opted and stripped of all but its superficial aspects. As on television, superficiality is matched only by simplicity, which is here manifested in the movie's cliched message and--even more obviously--in its title. While the title has a pretension of ironic under-statement, the movie...