Hobo With a Shotgun Review

The second feature film to be spun off a mock trailer from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, Hobo With a Shotgun promises much with a cool title, and the casting of the excellent Rutger Hauer. Unfortunately, it’s a disappointing mess.

The ‘story’ has a nameless Hobo (the perfectly cast Rutger Hauer) riding into Hope Town, only to find that it has become a crime ridden hole, ruled over by crime boss ‘The Drake’ (Brian Downey) and his sons Slick and Ivan (Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman) and renamed Fuck Town. The Hobo witnesses a robbery while he’s in a pawn shop, picks up a shotgun and start dispensing his own brand of bloody justice, aiming to leave Fuck Town (nope, that’s not getting funnier) to start a new life and a business with Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a prostitute he saved from Slick.

The great problem with Hobo With a Shotgun is simple: it’s not fun. Splatter can be fun, look at the joyous likes of Re-Animator, but Hobo seems to have a tonal problem; the graphic splatter set against a script with its tongue so firmly in its cheek just doesn’t seem to fit, especially when much of the violence – despite the constant, abysmal, puns – feels really painful and cruel. When John Carpenter showed a child being shot in Assault on Precinct 13 it worked because it went with the tone of the film, and because it was played seriously, but playing a moment in which Slick incinerates a school bus full of children as if it’s a fun little set piece really doesn’t work, in fact it’s borderline offensive.

This tonal disconnect recurs as the movie attempts to have its cake with an endless parade of gags and massively over the top villainous performances and eat it with brutal violence and occasional bursts of social commentary that, as well as being horribly written, feel incredibly out of place set against the rest of the movie. You just can’t have a film as shallow as this and then have your titular Hobo deliver a meaningful speech about the world going to shit to a ward full of babies. It just doesn’t fit, however good an actor Rutger Hauer is.

Hauer is a good actor, a great one even, but as has been the problem for many years in his less illustrious than he deserves career, he’s not really given a lot to do here. When he does get a speech to get his teeth into its either some saccharine nonsense about bears (really, don’t ask) or the aforementioned awful speech to the babies, but for most of the movie he’s stuck delivering groan inducing one liners like “You and me are goin’ on a car-ride to hell… and you’re riding shotgun!” and looking slightly pissed off about it. However, to his credit, Hauer at least attempts a real performance, the same can’t really be said of the villains, who end up being too over the top to really be scary, they’re good for a couple of laughs, but they aren’t as funny as they or the movie think they are (that said, the line “When life gives you razor blades… you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades“) did make me giggle. There’s nothing wrong with being over the top, but director Jason Eisener doesn’t quite embrace the tone and next to Hauer’s underplaying his other actors simply come off as amateurish.

Some might find the performances of Brian Downey, Gregory Smith (the kid from Small Soldiers, all growed up) and Nick Bateman to be delightful parodies of the terrible acting in classic grindhouse movies, for me, terrible acting is terrible acting. Smith and Bateman in particular find a performance style in a horrible middle ground of the venn diagram encompassing ridiculously over the top and completely wooden. If that’s what they’re going for then, well done, I guess, but it’s a pretty pointless aim. As Abby, Molly Dunsworth comes horribly unstuck with her rallying speech towards the end of the movie (but then you could ask Meryl Streep to deliver that speech and it would make her look like Megan Fox) but is otherwise solid and appealing as the hooker with the heart of gold, actually an exploitation movie with her as the central character might be more fun than this one.

The movie looks okay, and it embraces the grindhouse look, creating an authentic late 70′s feel (complete with ropey effects), but it is hobbled both by a script that is little more than moments and lines that writer John Davies and Eisener thought would be cool and by the fact that there’s nothing of Jason Eisener here, it’s all just a melange of his influences from Tarantino and Rodriguez to Jack Hill and (with The Plague) Enzo G. Castellari. I’d like to see Eisener do something that comes from him, rather than from his enthusiasms. Perhaps if I’d seen it at a midnight screening, packed with exploitation fans, this film might have worked better, but in the cold light of day it’s a failure. As an homage to awful grindhouse films it’s hard to fault Hobo With a Shotgun, but that is the problem, because it means that it IS an awful grindhouse film. I hate to do it, but I’m giving this a 3/10.