48 - Mall

    A series of vignettes dealing with a variety of characters in and around a mall.  Events center around one guy who goes on a brief rampage, shooting some cops and burning a business.
    I was a bit wary going in, considering the fairly poor rating on Netflix.  It has a 5.1 on IMDB.  It’s bad, but it’s not bad for the normal reasons.  It’s bad because it feels like a young director trying to be edgy and create a splashy style.  The opening scene is pretty good.  I liked the handheld approach, I liked seeing the camera move around the subject, and I liked the unbroken take.
    Then we go into the opening credits, and the movie takes a nosedive.  There’s a variety of visual effects, mostly distorting the video.  I don’t understand the purpose of this.  It doesn’t establish a tone, it doesn’t convey a message about mental state.  It’s mostly just an annoyance.
    Then we get to meet a bunch of other characters.  There’s a young, pale guy named Jeff who is everything I hate about pretentious teenagers.  It doesn’t seem like he develops either.  He points out a bunch of other people and makes up stories about them, which I think are supposed to be accurate.  Somehow, this actually makes me hate the character more.
    While the movie is supposed to hinge on this guy attacking the mall, that doesn't seem to be any more important than any of the other stories.  What I found to be supremely annoying during this was that there didn’t seem to be consistency in the flow of time.  Mall businesses are closing down… but it seems to be morning, or at least it just was.  Then it’s night.  Then it’s back to daytime, and mall businesses are open.  This isn’t even a difficult area to straighten out.  It’s a side effect of wanting to intercut a few characters, combined with a lack of planning.
    The script is pretentious and annoying.  It’s nonstop character observations that are an effort to be “deep” or “meaningful.”  They’re terrible.  They’re boring, they’re generally dislikable…
    I thought there would be a possibility for the script to pull things together and lead to a good ending, but instead, it just fizzles out into a dull stupor.
    I’m not too picky about movies, as you can probably tell.  I usually look for the good in everything.
    The good things about this are that it was technically proficient, at least as far as the photography and sound was concerned.  But everything that makes a good story or a compelling script was gone.  This is one of those rare “bad” movies that I watch.