Monday's Movie Madness - Review of "Rampage"

Our rating ** (2 stars)

It is hard to know what exactly to look for when you want some good old fashioned film violence. Do you go for cheesy over the top violence like a bad Arnold movie, or do you go for the more classic and hardman Guy Ritchie type, or do you go right off the deep end with arts film violence like Man Bites Dog, Bad Boy Bubby, or that old chestnut Saw, or the new kids on the horror block Hostel or The Human Centipede ?

Finding myself in a bind at the video store a while back I decided on a late night viewing of Rampage.
This movie is a bit vague on the kind of violence to expect on the cover, and given that they only had a couple of copies on the shelf, this could have meant it was either very bad, or very good in a hidden gem kind of way.
It seemed quite arts-housey as well, and that usually attracts me as I tend to get quite bored of the big studio fare.

The premise of the film promised alot; man gets feed up with society, kits up and goes on a rampage extracting his revenge on a world he feels nothing but contempt for..
Pretty simple, a plot full of opportunities to make some clever social commentary, guns and violence, and reasonably hard to get it wrong one would have thought.

Thoughts? Quite disappointed really. I guess if I had looked closely I would have seen that maverick, controversial  film maker Uwe Boll had written, directed and edited this movie - giving just one man complete editorial control of the content. That has to be a recipe for disaster right there! This is not a school project folks, this is our valuable down time we are talking about!
I was expecting so much more than just the opportunity to show violence for the sake of it.

If I had the opportunity to learn more about this film, and the biggest force in it, the triple threat of Uwe Boll, I would have not wasted my time, perhaps even re-watched an old classic of the genre, or maybe got around to watch Michael Moores "Bowling for Columbine".
Still the wiki page on Boll is pretty entertaining < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Boll >, prehaps more so than the movie, and if I could be bothered, searching out some of the boxing match clips he participated in against his harshest critics would be worth a watch.

In a lot of ways I was expecting a whole lot more point to the movie. It promised a lot with the selling of the central character as being at his wits end with the idiots he found himself surrounded by, and that he wanted to make a change in the world.
None of this is really brought to bear within the plot though.

The Plot - more holey than my favourite bush shirt!

This is where this movie really came undone for me.
I will not reveal all of the twists so as not to spoil it for anyone in the event they choose to watch this, but here is what I got from IMDb:

Bill Williamson is a warped, frustrated young man who hates his life and hates society which leads him to be driven over the edge of sanity while keeping his craftyness on. He is in his early twenties, lives with his parents and he works a low-paid job as a mechanic. Psychologically, he is continually bombarded with the problems of the world, by ubiquitous TV sets, radios, and the views of Evan Drince, a left-wing philosopher who seems to be his sole friend. One day, Bill, after being hurt after his parents tell him that it's time he left home, and tired of being victimized by his nasty and vindictive boss at work, Bill acts upon his plan to reduce the town's population. He believes overcrowding causes the world's problems.

Determined to extract revenge upon his small town where he lives, Bill builds himself a full-body suit of Kevlar armor, complete with a ballistic helmet and a paintball mask.

One day, Bill dons his suit of Kevlar armor, and goes to town

All of this is fairly run of the mill up until this point. When the shooting starts the whole thing just kind of falls apart and gets caught up in the violence for violence's sake. Some forethought here, followed through to the twists that the writer obviously had in mind, could have made all of the difference to this film.
By the end I was scratching me head think how robbed I felt over a story that only just held it together, but was so full of implausibility that it left a sour taste. After all, it is not an alien movie or anything, so some thinking on how the plot related to itself would have been a prerequisite one would have thought.

There are some high points to the movie - like the scene where he enters the bingo hall.
I guess this is the bit of the movie when the social commentary is made, is pretty dark, and has absolutely no blood spilling in it!

My final thoughts - check out the 90's classic SFW.