Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to an all new Reaction & Review. Tonight, guys, I'm gonna be covering a thriller from 2015. That movie is "Green Room".
I'm gonna tell you, guys, I know almost nothing about this movie. The only things I know about it is one cast member and the plot, from what little I skimmed on the back of the DVD case I own. Apparently, some punk band witnesses a murder and they have to escape the clutches from an evil club owner, who's also played by Patrick Stewart. Which, okay, that is something kinda different for Patrick Stewart. Because I usually see him play leading protagonists like his role as Picard from "Star Trek: The Next Generation". But I think this may be the first one of his roles where I'm seeing him playing a villain. Which sounds kinda interesting, really. So I'm curious to see what he'll be able to do here.
Beyond that, guys, I know next to nothing about this film. I don't remember seeing any trailers or clips from back in 2015, so I'm pretty much going into this one purely blind. I'm hoping for it to be good, but I don't know if it will be. The only way I'm gonna for sure is if I shut up and I push play, and I'm gonna do that right now. So, without further ado, it's time to kick back, relax, and check out "Green Room".
3 minutes later
So, guys, this movie's just started, and we already have a couple of our main characters stealing gasoline from someone else's car just so that they could fill their own. Because rather than, you know, going to a nearby gas station and refilling their vehicle with gas, someone decided it was a better idea to just steal someone's else gas. So far, guys, we're not off to a great start with likable characters. But I'm gonna give this movie a chance and see if that'll change.
5 minutes later
You know, guys, when our rock band admitted a little earlier that they don't have an online presence of any kind, I believe I may know why they don't. Because their music, which I just listened to a moment ago, sounds like shit. Granted, there wasn't much of a song there, but if that's just a taste of what their music actually sounds like, then I may be in for a bit of a painful experience here. I hope that I'm wrong, but so far, this movie's not giving off a good first impression.
17 minutes later
You know, guys, I would love to care about the plight of our main characters being held against their will here, however, I can't, because this movie hasn't even bothered to give us any names for these characters yet. I'm not asking for much here, guys, I just want to know who these characters are, beyond the fact that they're a shitty punk rock band. And yeah, their music is still shit by the way. Just in case you care to know the quality of their music. Still hasn't improved yet. But then again, that could be said about this movie so far. So, I guess some things go hand in hand, don't they?
19 minutes later
OK, so our main character's wrist is fucking bleeding out and is broken beyond repair, and probably doesn't have the gun neither anymore. And again, I probably would care more about this if I knew who the fuck he was or why I should care about him. But I still haven't gotten that yet, so I'm gonna continue to remain uncaring until this movie finds a reason to make me care about these nameless characters.
6 minutes later
All right, I have a question here. So, as I mentioned earlier, our main character's entire arm is covered with blood and cuts. And one of his friends, upon discovering that there's some kind of underground basement of sorts, grabs some duct tape and is taping up his wounds. Now I don't claim to be a doctor, but wouldn't you try to first treat the wounds with something like peroxide, or something to that effect, before you tape up the wounds? I'm only asking because I've been in a similar accident before, though not to the extreme of this guy here, but I do know that you normally try to treat the wounds first before you try to cover them up. Unless there's nothing like that to begin with down there, however, the idiot who's taping him up didn't even try to look for anything beyond just duct tape. But then again, I kinda have something resembling a functioning brain and the asshole who wrote this didn't.
17 minutes later
So we have another one of our characters being killed off by a dog. And you know what? I would probably feel sad that our main characters are being killed off one by one, but no. I really don't. This movie is so shallow with it's characters that I'm waiting for this film to fucking end. Granted, there's more than a half hour to go, which means I still have to suffer through it, but I'll still be happy once we reach the finish line.
The Review
Thank Christ, it's fucking over! Well, guys, that was "Green Room". Let me shut this horrendous thing off here...OK. Holy shit, was that a chore to get through. You guys have no idea how bad this movie was. And mind you, I went into it, thinking that it was going to be good. Hell, I wanted it to be amazing! Well unfortunately, that was probably asking for too much, because this movie was nowhere near that whatsoever.
So with that said, let's just dive right into this one here and try to talk about it some more here. Let's start with the writing. Now, I first want to explain to you guys the concept of a thriller. And it's really not too hard either, because thrillers are suppose to be suspenseful and it's suppose to keep you on the edge of your seat. A couple of examples I'm gonna bring up here are "Perfect Blue", which is easily my favorite thriller of all time. Another example would be last week's movie that I covered, which was "What's The Matter With Helen?". That one was also a rather good thriller, too. I'm even going to include a bad one here, which is "Hellbound". AKA, the one starring Chuck Norris. Because even that movie, as much as I didn't like it, was more interesting as a thriller than this thing was. All three of those movies worked in their own way because they give you a reason to keep watching, and they keep you interested so that you can see how they play themselves out.
This film doesn't do that. It gives you no reason to keep you interested in what's going on. To start with, let's talk about pacing. And really, guys, what the fuck is pacing here? This movie is slow, it's boring, and it's really poorly paced out. Especially the last half hour of the movie. It is so slow and so boring that I almost started to fall asleep by how boring it is. And that's not something a thriller should *ever* do! But this movie found a way to make me not interested in what's happening. I was almost tempted to just shut this movie off and go watch something else. But I didn't because, as per rules for Reaction & Review, I have to keep watching all the way to the end until I see credits. And I did, but I still felt like I wasted 95 minutes of time with this film because of how boring it is. In fact, this movie is quite possibly the most boring thriller I've seen in years! And again, I want to remind you, guys, that I watched shit like "Hellbound", but at least that movie had an interesting concept for a story. Granted, it didn't exactly work, but at least it still tried to be somewhat interesting. This film, however, failed to be interesting. And it's really kinda sad when a movie starring guy who's mostly known for outdated memes and "Chuck Norris Facts" was able to be more interesting than what the fuck this movie had to offer.
Now I probably should try to cover more of the story here, but honestly, guys, there really isn't much here I can comment on in terms of story. As I mentioned earlier, our main characters, who are also part of a punk rock band, accidentally end up discovering a murder in the room that they were staying in. Shit starts to go south for our characters, which ends up becoming a battle of survival between them and Patrick Stewart's goons. Yes, I know he probably has a name in the movie, but I honestly don't remember what it is because, like with most of our main characters, none of them have any names that are memorable whatsoever. The only names I could pick up were Pat, which I believe is our main protagonist, and Tiger, who was the guy who taped up Pat's wounds and also gets killed by a dog, along with one of our female characters. And that's it. Those are the only names I could remember being uttered out in the movie. Everyone else I don't really care to look up because they're so fucking forgettable anyways.
In fact, rather than talking about the characters in this movie, I'm going to give any future filmmakers reading this review a tip on how to write interesting characters. Now I've said this many times beforehand and I'm going to continue saying this until filmmakers actually get this shit right. If you are going to write a movie, let's say a thriller for example, you want to give the viewer a reason to care about your characters. Now I'm not saying that you have to give them ultra deep backstories or anything, but the main priority should be to make them interesting. Make them stand out in a way that makes the viewer want to care about your characters and the situations that they're in. If you don't do that, then you get movies like this, where every character is vapid, shallow, and beyond lifeless. To a point where nobody's going to care about your characters whatsoever. The worst thing you could do is make the viewer hope that your character is going to die off because they have no redeeming qualities to them at all. And if that happens, well, again, you get movies like "Green Room", which is a great example of what not to do when writing interesting characters.
So yeah, guys, to sum up, the writing in this movie is beyond horrible. There is nothing here than I can say is a remote positive when it comes to this movie's writing. It's just terrible across the entire board. And adding on to all that, the acting is just as bad as the writing is. Everyone's acting in this movie is just terrible and I'm even going to include Patrick Stewart. Guys, Patrick Stewart is one of those actors where you can give him almost any kind of script and he's able to make it work. Not so much here, though, because his acting here borders on being wooden and almost lifeless. His character is shit, much like every other character in this movie, thus he had nothing work with. Now I can't entirely blame his performance here because there's only so much you can do when you're given a script that is this bad. And I'm even going to include every other actor here because it's possible that they may have had better roles in other movies. I don't know for sure yet, but if that's the case, then it has to be better than what they could do here in this movie, because all of the acting is just terrible. Except for one, however. There's a dog in this movie, right towards the end of the film, where it walks by it's dead master's corpse and just lays it's head on it's legs. That's it. That's the *only* good performance in this movie, which is really sad considering it's from a killer dog and all.
Special effects in this movie are actually halfway decent. This movie relies a lot on practical effects when it comes to it's kills. So you'll being seeing a quite a bit of blood and gore effects, and they're not too bad either. They're not amazing, mind you, but they're still at least the best thing about this movie. Same thing goes with squib work for the guns. They're also pretty good, too.
Camerawork here is pretty good. Lighting here is decent. Sound-mixing here is competent. The music here is shit, unsurprisingly. Now admittedly, this movie doesn't really have much for a score here, as there are a lot of silent moments in this movie. However, when it comes to our rock band playing their music, it becomes shit. Now thankfully, you don't get to hear a whole lot of it. But what is here from them still sucks balls. And I don't want to hear some lame ass excuse that their music is suppose to be 'intentionally bad'. Those people can fuck right off because they don't know the first thing about music in general. Now if, somehow, that is the case, and their music *was* suppose to be intentionally bad, well then, mission accomplished. They made shitty music. And again, I'm not surprised that they don't have a social media presence because they would've been laughed off from even the shittier rock bands that exist on the internet.
So anyway, when all is said and done, guys, am I able to recommend "Green Room"? Fuck no! This movie is a colossal turd on almost every aspect. As a thriller, it fails miserably on being thrilling. The pacing here is dogshit. The acting is just as horrible as the writing is. There is nothing here at all that is redeemable about this movie. It is easily one of the most boring thrillers I have ever seen in a long time. And the more that I have a physical copy of this movie around me, the more that I'm starting to feel ill just looking at it. So yeah, this thing is easily going to be traded in as soon as possible. But until then, I'm going to watch an actual good thriller. And the first thing that easily comes to mind is "Perfect Blue". I'm gonna go and watch that right now just so I can forget how awful the movie I had to sit through was.
Anyway, guys, with that, we come to the close of another Reaction & Review. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, take care, and I will see you all later. Peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment