Green Room 2016

[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.

Definitely not my favorite movie of all time. Very difficult to follow (for me, anyway) and disjointed. I suppose maybe it helps if you're really into the punk rock scene…I don't know if that makes the disjointed, fragmented dialogue easier to follow or what, but there was so much of this that was just mumbly-jumbly, wah wah wah this or that fractured diction and disjointed conversation that I had a really hard time following what was actually happening (there never was a "why" so I'm still at a loss for that). Also, they made it really...well actually impossible to believe the "turnaround" revenge story: the guy "Pat" has a completely mangled hand that's almost severed and held in place by duct tape; the girl "Amber" has a shotgun blast in her thigh yet she never even limps through their entire trek through the woods nor is there ANY bloodshed from the wound, in spited of walking all that way. Just silly oversights like that made it hard to buy into the conclusion of this film. The "shotgun blast" sounds like a .22-caliber rifle more than a shotgun, the idea that a 150-lb punk teenager could somehow hold a 300-lb giant in place with a simple armbar - when the 300-lb guy in a situation like that would've quickly taken a chunk of the kid's leg, forcing him to release the armbar involuntarily (if not voluntarily) - just all sorts of gaffes throughout that made this one...not really "difficult" to sit through, but just so far-fetched that I had a hard time buying in to any of it. There wasn't a single character that I felt the first hint of a connection to; just another indicator that this wasn't really a good film. I was disconnected almost from the beginning of the story, since there was no reasoning behind any of it. I still have no idea who "Tad" is, or what part he played in this: was this all a Hostel - like setup for flesh-eating dogs? What was this all about? The story never tells, never reveals, never does anything. There's some violence and bloodshed, sure, but that in itself doesn't make this worth watching. My recommendation would be to skip this one; it's relatively short (1:35:00) but it's an hour-and-a-half of your time that could be far better spent watching something better than this one. This just wasn't a very good storytelling film. No substance, no story, no sense. Very discombobulated and difficult to follow. It was interesting seeing Patrick Stewart in such a very different role but his small behind-the-scenes role didn't even come close to carrying this one. I would definitely recommend giving this one a hard pass.