[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.
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