[6.0/10] Write enough reviews, and you learn things about yourself. Breaking down what makes a film work for you or not helps you to crystalize your tastes. And one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that if the characters don’t work for me, chances are the movie won’t either.
Green Room has a solid enough premise. A metal band plays a gig at a Neo Nazi club. One of them walks in on the aftermath of a murder. And suddenly it’s “Die Hard in a white supremacist music hall” as the bandmembers try to escape while paramilitary bigots try to erase any witnesses.
The movie has no supernatural elements, but it has the rhythms of a slasher. The band-members plot and plan and try to outsmart their pursuers. But they’re picked off one by one, sometimes taking out their attackers in the process, but generally just being backed into more of a corner as the Neonazis step up their methods.
The results are gory, with arms brutalized through doorways, people chewed up by abused dogs, box cutters slicing through abdomens, and the usual blood and guts you might expect from something where blades, fangs, and “cartridges” and used with abandon. Oftentimes the visuals are gruesome, with a sense of realism to the damage even if the combat veers more toward the exaggerated. But the direction and color-grading of it all is desultory and dull. Still, on a sheer technical level, there is action here.
There is not, however, a character worth caring about here. The members of the protagonist band, their local ally who also witnessed the murder, and the other random goons who help or hurt them, have only the wisps of personalities rather than becoming well-rounded characters. The movie gives each some light sketching, just enough to give the audience the flavor of these victims-to-be (including via the “running gag”, for lack of a better term, of each answering who would be their “desert island band”). But all of them lack an inner life, and none of the actors are able to do the heavy lifting to make up for what the script lacks.
Each is basically just fodder for hounds or shotgun blasts or the claustrophobic setpieces that are the bigger concern of the film. You can barely keep the characters’ names straight, let alone divine what they want or care about beyond the immediate need to escape from a lethal, evil force.
That force is Darcy, the owner of the white supremecist meeting hall and rock club, and the militia goons and “true believers” he commands to mop up this crime scene and tie up loose ends. The one thing Green Room has going for it is getting to see Patrick Stewart play a villain for once. (Depending on how you feel about Locutus of Borg.) Stewart is menacing and methodical, showing the sense of steely leadership his performances are known for, but translated to a vicious boss who uses his organization and calmness in a crisis for ill purposes rather than high-minded noble ones.
Stewart plays against type here, and it’s the most unique and distinctive thing in the movie. He’s the only player whose sheer talent can overcome the underwritten nature of pretty much everyone in the picture.
The best you can say for Green Room is that even if the characters are flat nothings, it can get by as a mood piece. It’s hard to care about what happens to these random schmucks who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the sense of fear and paranoia of finding yourself trapped in the titular room, while bad people marshal their forces and you’re forced to improvise a way to save your own skin, permeates the movie. To the extent the bandmates are cyphers, it provides the audience the opportunity to step into their shoes and feel their terror as the wolves at the gates start to claw their way in.
But what that initial stand-off generates in tension is sunk by the larger-than-life vibe the film takes on as it proceeds. This pack of shaggy punks who siphon gas and seem as with-it and self-directed as a sleepy toddler are suddenly able to spelunk their way through a Neonazi hideout and master enough tactics and weaponry to make a go of it.
At some point, Green Room stops being a plausible enough vision of a bunch of dumb kids getting caught up in a bad situation, and starts being a troop of mini-action heroes finding ways to handle themselves with surprising alacrity in a desperate situation. There’s a few fig leafs you can pull from the script -- mentions of paintball matches and MMA training -- but at no point do the bandmates feel like a group of people who could achieve all that they do in horrific combat here, and the resulting sequences aren’t good enough to make you want to excuse the implausibility of it all.
I’m sure there’s a point to all of this. If you squint, you can see gestures toward ideas of an idealized past and the dangerous places those notions can lead. You can see tributes to the atavistic triumphing over the rigid and measured. You can see warnings about scary folks on the periphery of society flying beneath the radar but doing real harm.
But mostly, Green Room plays like an indifferent slasher flick where the context and unfortunate resonance of its Neonazi backdrop seems more like set dressing than a statement. I’m sure there’s dots I haven’t connected here, but you could replace the white supremacists assholes here with a random criminal enterprise or a wide-eyed cult, or anything else really, and not lose much in the way of antagonism.
It speaks to the interchangeability of the pieces in this film, especially the characters. When all you have is a good premise, without the memorable players to populate it, your story will feel lifeless and unimportant, no matter how big or bloody the stakes. Nobody here matters. All of them are archetypes being moved around on a game board. I’m sure that’s someone’s cup of earl grey, hot. But I’ve watched enough movies, horror and otherwise, to know that Green Room isn’t mine.
What is a woman? You are either Male, Female or Hermaphrodite the rest is made up. You either have a penis or a vagina... If you cut of your penis and take hormones you are still a male with a cut off penis that's taking female hormones. Two of the chromosomes (the X and the Y chromosome) determine your sex as male or female when you are born. They are called sex chromosomes: Females have 2 X chromosomes. Males have 1 X and 1 Y chromosome. If there are extra chromosomes its very rare and a defect. What is this clown world? You can't argue with facts...
I have nothing against transgenders but let's keep it real! It's the same when I would identify myself as a male cat while you clearly see a human female. And I can't expect anyone to change reality and enter my imaginary delusional bubble and call me a male cat. Just because you feel like something doesn't make it reality. Just like Martina Big isn't a black woman, Dennis Avner isn't a tiger and Rodrigo Alves isn't a Ken Doll. But again if you are a male and you really want to live your life as a female go do what makes you happy! Live your life as a transgender! But don't claim to be something you are not just because you feel like it.
I really wanted to quote this:
Matt: "I want to understand reality and get to the truth."
Professor Dr. Patrick Grzanka: Yea, I'm really uncomfortable with that language "getting to the truth" because that sounds deeply transphobic to me and if you keep going we are going to stop the interview. The word truth is condescending and rude"
As a fan of Seagal's earllier films (Nico, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death and Out for Justice) I was looking forward to see how his first real big budget movie (Under Siege had a budget of $35Million, compared to the $10-$14Million that his earlier films had) was going to be and I wasn't disappointed, I had never heard of the director Andrew Davis, but just one year later (1993) he would give us 'The Fugitive' with Harrison Ford and again Tommy Lee Jones. Yes it's a sort of Die Hard clone, but then what movie where one man takes on an entire army / terrorist cell, isn't these day, but the action is well directed, compared to Seagal's later movies (On Deadly Ground being one) where the hand to hand has been speeded up, this is pure Seagal. We have, a what seemed to be at the time a puzzling casting choice with Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey playing the villians, but was actually a stroke of genius by then casting director Pamela Basker, who was also Casting Director on Marked for Death, Out for Justice and later On Deadly Ground. Jones and Busey are for me the highlights of the movie, Tommy Lee on fine Character acting form as the ex-CIA operative with a history with Seagal's Ryback character, great stunts, great action, the only downside was in truth Erika Eleniak who in my opinion didn't bring anything to the movie apart from the now infamous cake scene. Enjoyable and fun actioner that hits all the right spots.
