Red State Reviews

Smith goes a completely different direction than what he's known for and the results are much better than "Cop Out."

I'm a long term Kevin Smith's fan, i like his writing, his comedy and his vision, and i don't oppose change, i don't go around asking him to stick into what he usually do, but i mean come on, not this, this is just a mess of a movie, too many genres squashed together into glimpse of a clusterfuck, a movie that surpassed irritation, into a brand new level of violating the viewer, it's blatant disregard of the viewer sanity passed along as a "satire" and it failed on every level.

Kevin Smith cleverness was able to make him sell this movie, through Q&A sessions, in which he explained his "vision" to bunch of fanboys who would pretty much clap along to anything, but his "vision" weren't even close to his work, that's why you hear so many promising things but then you watch something irrelevant, it's outright false advertisement.

It's a story about three guys who go to craigslist trying to get laid, they end up finding an old women whose ready to do a foursome, so she drug them all together and give them to the church, in which her family is bunch of fundamentalists in small town, who oppose homosexuality, infidelity and pretty much anything against the bible, and early on in the movie, you see a funeral of a homosexual teenager, in which you learn later that the family killed him just for being homosexual, but the movie never explain why these three guys are the new target, because they weren't homosexuals, so you just have to assume that the church family oppose anything against the bible, which in this case adultery.

The most obscene thing about this movie is the exaggerated look into christian fundamentalists, a bunch of irritating faces that made me lose my sanity. and Kevin Smith dragged along that church scene way too long for the viewer to even recover from, an extremely boring 20 minutes of Michael Parks as a pastor in which he drowned into his own randomness, 20 minutes of random irrelevant screenplay that did not make any sense, surrounded by the pastor is the most irritating, charmless faces ever put together in one movie, and their exaggerated reactions to the pastor speech made it way worse than anyone can imagine, furthermore, you can't sense what the director is trying to accomplish here, i mean, is he making fun of them? or is this scene really that deep?, so you set in there bored as hell, confused as what to make of it, should you take it seriously or laugh at it?, specially, when the three guys you invested in, is about to be killed by these fundamentalists.

The movie is 80 minutes long, and it combined horror, crime, action, supposedly a political satire, and some kinda of black comedy at the end, and the movie failed at pretty much everything with the exception of horror, because the movie was fully engaging and it force you to invest in these three guys, before killing them brutally each one at a time. the action scene was another 20 minutes of a boring shootout between the FBI and the members of the family, a scene in which you can only assume one thing only, and it is Kevin Smith buying time to make it a full length movie, and he already did that with the pastor scene, and he did it again with the FBI agent Joseph Keenan, played by John Goodman, in which he have a long scene of one-sided phone call, where you learn about the family and what type on guns they posses and Kevin Smith tried to give the audience an alternate reality when he compared them to Fred Phelps family, the guy from Westboro Baptist Church, in which his message was like "this is a another hate group, but one that doesn't mind getting their hands dirty", and the message were invalid.

And to give credit where the credit is due, the movie looks great, the horror factors works really good with that camera work, the shootout was great, although pointless, i don't remember hearing a score though, and the performances weren't important nor memorable, the movie brutally kills the three guys and make you feel really irritated, and it was really confusing, because it was really hard not to take it seriously, also really hard to figure out what's Kevin Smith vision on this one, because if you're going to make a movie about fundamentalists, then make a movie about fundamentalists, don't insert some random satire at the end with that horn scene and ruin it for everybody.

And when Kevin smith did try to explain it at the end, he brought the most random actors, and execute that semi-court scene with minimal, outright horrible performances, with some really dark confusing "comedy" mocking these fundamentalists, and trying to deliver an encrypted message on the way that U.S handle terrorists. it's not valid, very irritating and can't not be taken seriously and it is the most lazy way to close a confusing movie. it's just Kevin Smith getting a free pass so he can walk away without explaining it, then explain it in any way he likes to fanboys clapping with a standing ovation.

Overall, it's bad, not valid, lazy, irritating, sometimes even violating it's audience, 80 minutes of a confusing mess that can't be taking seriously nor can be ignored, and it's Kevin Smith take on fundamentalists and politics, and it's outright horrible.

I'm not Kevin Smith's biggest fan. Besides Red State, I've only seen Clerks, Clerks 2, Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. His light hearted comedies didn't impress me all that much. They were mildly entertaining.

Red State, on the other hand, really surprised me in that it shows Kevin Smith going in a very different direction from his previous films. He deserves credit for taking a huge risk with this film but it has been very poorly received. I completely disagree with the haters. People say it's an inconsistent, incoherent mess. Blah, blah, blah......

It's very intense and gripping and I would argue that it's better than most of the so-called action movies that I've seen over the last few years. It has a great hook at the beginning and Michael Parks is brilliant. Parks plays the role to perfection. You don't have to agreee or disagree with the stance of the characters or the filmmaker. People seem to be offended by the film but it should only be judged as a piece of cinema, not as a document of real life.

Even though I wasn't sure what to expect, since I have always been a fan of Kevin Smith, I still wanted to check it out. To be honest, I thought it was actually pretty good and I was above all impressed how Smith managed to make a feature so completely different in tone than his previous movies. Indeed, even Kevin Smith himself has admitted it, even though he might be a decent writer, he remains a rather limited director and if you don't agree, you should just check his filmography. So, I did like this flick, especially the first half was really intriguing with setting up these teenagers and this Christian cult. Unfortunately, I wasn't so sure about the 2nd half. Indeed, at some point, seemingly out of nowhere, some Federal agents got involved and within minutes the whole thing turned into a huge shoot-out which lasted forever. With a running time of barely 80 minutes, you shouldn't spend 20 minutes with people only shooting at each other. The wrap-up at the end with a briefing involving John Goodman was also rather underwhelming. Still, I enjoyed most of it and, in my opinion, in spite of its poor construction, it is a rather tense and realistic horror feature, 10 times better than most of the slasher flicks I have seen and way better than the current torture porn wave.

"People just do the strangest things when they believe they're entitled. But they do even stranger things when they just plain believe."

Following a career of profane comedies and light-hearted relationship dramas, Kevin Smith moves into darker territory with 2011's Red State. A jarring mishmash of horror and action supplemented with satire, the film is morally repugnant and unbelievably incoherent, ushering in a different side of Smith that I hope to never see again. Critics often describe films as being "schizophrenic," but the term is overused and now comes off as pretentious. Red State, though, undoubtedly earns the label: it's schizophrenic to extremes. In a notorious move, Smith fostered a lot of interest in the film by purchasing the distribution rights himself and screening the film during a multi-city tour which also included Q&A sessions and memorabilia auctions. Indeed, Red State developed into more of an event than just a film. Unfortunately, however, the finished product is stunningly underwhelming, to the extent that it feels like a bad joke on the part of Smith.

In the South, three randy teenage boys - Jarod (Gallner), Travis (Angarano) and Billy-Ray (Braun) - begin using the internet to find easy sex, and organise to hook up with a mysterious woman (Leo) who lives near their hometown. What the boys fail to realise, though, is that they are being set up by a controversial group of extreme fundamentalists who detest homosexuals. Presided over by the psychotic sermon-spouting patriarch Abin Cooper (Parks), the boys are drugged and bound, with the pastor looking to ritualistically murder them all before his congregation. However, a group of ATF agents led by Joseph Keenan (Goodman) arrive at Cooper's compound with orders to move in and slaughter everyone inside.

Why exactly were these young teenagers chosen for ritual execution? Blown if I know. The church are vehemently anti-homosexual, yet they want to kill a bunch of kids who were attracted to the notion of pussy? It's mildly suggested that the church abhors sexual deviancy, but the film fails to touch upon this notion in any considerable fashion, and there's absolutely no motivation. Not to think too deeply into Smith's thinking, but it sets off alarm bells that the writer-director refused to insert gay protagonists into this story about a church of homophobes.

It's clear that Smith's primary objective with Red State was satire, but his ambitions far outweigh his abilities. The film initially sets its sights on religious fundamentalists who fool themselves into believing that they can commit unspeakable acts in the lord's name. To Smith's credit, the religious satire is actually spot-on, with Smith staging a number of nail-bitingly tense and frightening sequences. But Smith soon progresses the story into, well, another movie entirely. Suddenly, Red State dissolves into a mindless action flick which is so tonally schizophrenic that you may get whiplash. Smith's satiric target becomes the American government, reinforcing the tired message that Americans are terrible at handling terrorist situations. But whereas the religious satire was mature and effective, the governmental material relies on outright slapstick, dumb theatrics and predictable throwaway lines, as if a teenager wrote it. It feels like two separate people wrote the two halves of the film, and Smith just jammed them together with no thought towards thematic or narrative coherence. Consequently, Red State is a jumbled mess of ideas. Smith wanted to do too much within the film's scant 85-minute runtime that none of the satire ultimately leads anywhere, and the film fails as both an action picture and a horror movie.

As the picture begins to wind down, a late twist suggests that all hell is about to break loose and the production is about to take on an entire new meaning that could've transformed it from audacious dud to minor miracle. But alas, it was not to be. Smith just cuts away at random, and the rest of the movie comprises of Agent Keenan explaining the boring specifics of how the skirmish ended. The twist itself, meanwhile, just becomes a punchline for a dumb joke. It's deflating, but all the more infuriating if one reads Smith's description of the ballsy original ending. The final scene here is completely unnecessary and exceedingly pedestrian, with the characters spelling out every thought and message in Red State's cinematic body. It's the equivalent of having an 8-year-old boy yell straight into your ear with a megaphone. Furthermore, Smith clearly takes issue with abuse of government power to silence potential terrorists. But Cooper's church are terrorists; they stockpile guns, they kill on a whim, and they're morally damaged. This confuses the movie's entire concluding point. What the fuck?

Smith often excels as a writer (though this is not demonstrated here), but he's a mediocre director. 2010's Cop Out emphasised how incompetent Smith's filmmaking is, and Red State is equally disheartening. A lot of the editing is much too harsh, which botches the tempo of several scenes, while director of photography David Klein heavily leans on predictable visual tactics like shaky-cam and body-mounted cameras to poor effect. There's also a tremendous problem with the climactic shootout: there's no rhythm. All Smith does is stage a lot of minor character dialogue moments set to non-diegetic gun-firing sounds, and every few minutes we get a customary shot of a few people firing their guns for which they seem to have unlimited ammunition. It diminishes the sense of immediacy, because people only seem to get shot every 5 minutes or so, and there seems to just be a lot of mindless shooting without casualties. As a result, the whole enterprise grows mind-numbingly tedious, and the actual shootout itself becomes too much of a fringe threat.

At the very least, Smith assembled one hell of a cast here. In particular, Michael Parks delivers a stunning performance as Pastor Abin. If Parks knew that Red State was bad, he doesn't show it; he truly went for broke, and he's easily the film's most valuable asset. However, Smith seems too enamoured with Parks to discipline his performance, resulting in sermons that drag on forever. Yes, I know that Smith had a lot to say, but brevity is appreciated. John Goodman, meanwhile, is predictably good as Agent Keenan, and the trio of boys playing the teens all did a great job. Special mention must be made of Kerry Bishé, who will probably be forever known as the one who destroyed Scrubs after having become the new protagonist in the show's dismal final season. Here, Bishé shows genuinely impressive acting chops as Cheyenne, one of the only adults in Cooper's church with something resembling a moral compass.

I'll credit Red State with one thing: it's wildly unpredictable, and it has its moments. Whatever fans of the movie which exist will probably proclaim that it's entertaining because it's uniquely crazy, but that entirely comes down to opinion. For me, the picture may work in pieces but it fails to gel as a whole. Smith tried to pack the film with historical and societal relevance, yet the filmmaker stumbles to do anything substantial with his ideas, merely staging brainless shootouts and tediously extended monologues. It seems Smith simply made things up as he goes along, hoping that heightened shock value and repulsive acts will add up to something laudable. In the end, Red State is exceedingly superficial; it's all about gimmicks rather than genuine substance.

3.8/10

Interesting, I suppose, in a violent way, but the violence overshadowed any greater point that the movie might have had to make. Maybe the story points weren't fleshed out well enough, but I didn't care about any of these people so trying to come up with some emotion as they were all being shot was a hard sell. I've really liked Kevin Smith's work in the past, but I don't think this one measured up.

The first 30 minutes or so of Red State are terrific. The experience during the first act is similar to that of getting a spectator's seat in the gallows of hell. The portrayal of religious fanaticism during these initial scenes is so hard-hitting, and the scenes reek with delightful malevolence and intensity. If Kevin Smith's ONLY aim with this film had been to criticize Christian fundamentalists who take their faith to the unspeakably low lengths that the characters in Red State do, the events of that first half hour would've gotten expanded into a full-length motion picture, and I'd probably be telling you that this is one of the boldest, most savagely great pictures of the year. There's no doubt about Smith's mastery at criticizing extreme religious conservatism. Unfortunately, there's another target at which Smith chooses to aim his arrows here, and he fares considerably less well at it. The remaining hour of Red State consists of depressingly unenticing scenes that take aim at how poor a job the U.S. government and its uniformed forces have done at handling situations of terrorism. There's no doubt that it's an extremely relevant and interesting subject for purposes of criticism, but the caliber of Red State's commentary on that subject feels like straight out of the brain of a 13-year-old. Add to that an unnecessary amount of annoyingly staged shoot-out sequences and a TERRIBLE penultimate scene in which U.S. officials explain everything away in order to hit you over the head with the film's message as hard as possible, and you've got the very definition of a film that goes way downhill after having gotten off to an amazing start.

It's another day at school for Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun), Jarod (Kyle Gallner) and Travis (Michael Angarano). Sure, there's a thing on the news about "some gay guy" who was mysteriously beat to death, and there's a group of Christian fundamentalists who belong to the Five Points Trinity Church and are doing a lot of protesting and calling all the heathens out for their sins, and yada-yada-yada, but since they're teenage boys, they don't really care much about any of that - they're more interested in sex. In fact, they're using a Craigslist-type web site to see if they can find themselves a woman who's willing to let them all bang her, and what do you know, they find one who lives in their same county. There's some apprehension, but obviously, the desire to get laid trumps it, and they head over to the woman's house. Turns out it's Sara (Melissa Leo), who's definitely older than they thought, but they tell each other that she's still "better looking than they expected," so they'll settle for it. Sure enough, though, it's all a trap - and soon, the three guys are taken into a place of horror in which they're to be judged for "the sin" that they'd been gearing up to commit. Gone is their earlier indifference towards those religious nutjobs whom they saw protesting earlier, as the three teens are now prisoners of the Five Points Trinity Church, which is led by Sara's father, Abin (Michael Parks), whose idea of how to punish the "sinners" he captures is as teeth-chattering and vile as it gets.

I can't say enough about the greatness of the sequence of scenes during which the boys are physically captured in the church while listening to Abin speak to his congregation. If there's one aspect of Red State that never, EVER ceases to be great, it's Michael Parks' amazing, bile-spewing performance. You see, his Abin may not believe in "peddling the soft faith" that other churches do, but as he says the horrific things that he says during his sermon, there's not a moment during which he fails to ooze the level of conviction that we're used to seeing from a real-life, enthusiastic church minister. Of course, Abin says things that, to any reasonable human being, are absolutely AWFUL, but what's amazing about Parks' performance is that he absolutely makes us believe that those sitting in his congregation fervently believe in him. Credit also has to go to all the actors sitting in the congregation (mostly playing members of Abin's family) whose reactions to Abin's words are perfectly executed. Any time that the three boys cry for help, Abin's followers react the way a farmer would react towards an animal's yelps of pain while it's being slaughtered. It's all executed very, very well. But while Parks' performance is astounding all the way to the end, I can't say the same for the rest of the film's aspects.

A filmmaker who decides to take aim at how American forces have dealt with religious fundamentalism and terrorism is definitely making a bold and respectable decision. But for me to commend the actual EXECUTION of it, it would need to be handled with a level of intelligence higher than that of a pot-smoking college kid. The over-extended and unnecessary shoot-out sequences are bad enough on their own, but when Red State finally poses the question of WHY the U.S. has decided to go about things the way it has, the line it uses to explain it is so incredibly simple-minded and juvenile: "What do you think this is? September 10, 2001?" I find it very difficult to believe that the person who wrote that line is the same person who wrote all the terrific vermin that Abin spoke during his sermon earlier in the film. The ultimate message that American response to terrorist threats has been that of simply doing what they deem fit (even if it's morally or legally wrong) is something that one can easily have gathered from watching the news during the last 10 years. Therefore, it's a message that lacks insight and only scratches the surface of something that's a lot more complex. Aside from the never failing greatness of Parks' performance, the only other good aspects to be pointed out about the film's last hour is that there are a few well-executed and well-shot chase sequences, and that there are times at which certain characters are killed when you don't expect them to, which gives the whole thing a flavor of unpredictability. Nevertheless, unpredictability doesn't really taste that good when you're still trying to get over the disappointment of the film's early greatness vanishing as soon as it shifts gears at the half-hour mark.

I'm a strong believer in the philosophy that, if people are going to present a critical assessment of a subject, they should definitely have something more than layman's knowledge of it. I get the feeling that you could have a terrific conversation with Kevin Smith about the evils of Christian extremism, but not so much about the evils of the Homeland Security Department. Since Smith doesn't have enough to say about the latter subject, he exposes us to painfully long scenes of gunfire that offer nothing in the way of interest or insight, and start leading to the downfall of Red State. If all you have to say is "Man, the government is corrupt," then as much as I may agree, it's not something that's really worth saying - people know it already, and it's also something that has already been said more effectively in plenty of other films. I'm as liberal as can be, and I agree completely with every message that is delivered in Red State, but unlike other people, I can't give credit to something ONLY because I agree with it. It's very shallow to do that. The more important consideration, especially when it comes to cinema, is not WHAT is said, but HOW it is said. In the case of Red State, there's a magnificently impetuous ardor to the way in which Smith communicates his first-act musings on the hellish depths that can be reached by God-fearing lunatics. It's too bad I can't say the same for what comes after that. If the people behind Red State had all realized how great the material of the first act was and had simply continued on with it, the film would be an absolute winner and the great Michael Parks would be in line for an Oscar nomination. I won't forget his performance come the end of the year, but unfortunately, I also won't forget the fact that his brilliant rendition of God's wrath deserved a much better film.