RED STATE DVD (2011)

SYNOPSIS: Three teenaged boys are lured to the town of Cooper’s Dell with the promise of a party. But instead of enjoying the night of their dreams, the teens are plunged into the nightmarish world of Pastor Abin Cooper and the Five Points Trinity, a fundamentalist group with a stockpile of weaponry and a deadly moral agenda. When word of the teens’ disappearance reaches the authorities, a military task force is mobiliz ed. With Cooper’s Dell teetering between salvation and damnation, the ATF braces for a furious gun battle with Cooper and his heavily armed followers in this fever-pitched action thriller from writer-director Kevin Smith.

MOVIE REVIEW:

There is nothing funny about Kevin Smith’s latest film, ‘Red State’; in fact, it is deadly serious, and we mean deadly in the most literal sense. Ever the enfant terrible of indie American cinema, Smith’s aim is this time trained on religiously fanatic right-wing Christian fundamentalists – hence the title of the movie. And despite a clearly limited budget, Smith delivers a captivating action thriller that taps into the zeitgeist fears of our time.

Like most of Smith’s movies do, this one starts out with three horny teenage boys - Travis (Michael Angarano), Jarod (Kyle Gallner) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) – who are looking to get some. On the promise of a threesome with an older woman Sara (Melissa Leo), the trio set off to a trailer in some dumpy blackwater town named Cooper’s Dell. Unfortunately, Sara just happens to be the daughter of fanatical preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), and their supposed online date no more than a trap.

Turns out besides picketing outside the homes of homosexuals, Cooper has also been playing God’s moral executioner, kidnapping them and other sinners all in the name of doing God’s work. No matter that his teachings are so lunatic that even Neo-Nazi groups distance themselves from him, Cooper preaches from the pulpit with clarity and conviction to his small congregation of family members and their mates - and like blind converts, they learn not to question a single word he says.

Smith devotes ten full minutes of the film’s limited screen time to Cooper’s interpretation of the Bible, and it is a mesmerising sequence that truly exemplifies the power of the spoken word. It also proves to be a surprisingly compelling role for the veteran actor, and if you haven’t yet taken notice of who he is, this is one role that will make you sit up and watch. Parks and Leo also make for an effectively disturbing father-daughter pairing, and practically steal the show from start to finish.

It does take some time for the film to go into action mode – but not before the introduction of the ATF field agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) and his deputy (Kevin Pollak), the latter if only for a brief moment. First tasked to rescue the three hostages, Keenan gets orders on the ground to clear out Cooper’s farmhouse church – apparently his superiors have decided to just get rid of their problem once and for all by labelling Cooper a domestic terrorist in order justify a heavy firepower assault on him and his followers on the compound.

Anyone who has seen Smith’s earlier ‘Cop Out’ will know he is no action director, but here he injects a thrilling edge to the film by making practically every character expendable. The kills are fast, brutal and unexpected – in other words, not in the order by which Hollywood conventions subscribe to. He also introduces a moral question in the midst of the ensuing firefight, as Sara’s daughter pleads with one of the lawmen and then no less than one of the hostages to lead her and the rest of the women and children of Cooper’s misguided flock to safety.

Religious conservatives will hate the movie, but for everyone else, this presents a realistically frightening scenario where extreme right-wing beliefs taking hold in the United States are coupled with Second Amendment rights for citizens to bear arms. Besides religious intolerance, Smith also takes aim at the abuse of state power, especially with a final scene that sees the Authorities laughing about the sort of blanket powers they possess.

For Smith, it is also one of his most mature films to date, as it sees him put away his Jay and Silent Bob personas on which he claimed his fame on. Whether he has matured in his craft as a filmmaker is another question, but in attempting a subject as charged and as relevant as extreme religious fundamentalism, Smith deserves to be applauded for ‘Red State’. 

AUDIO/VISUAL:

The Dolby Digital 2.0 barely brings out the firepower of the ammunition in the movie, but the dialogues survive well enough. Visuals are clear, but as befitting the setting, colours are often muted and dull.

MOVIE RATING:

DVD RATING :

Review by Gabriel Chong