Red State Movie Review

Yes, Red State is an improvement over Kevin Smith’s last film; the self reviewing Cop Out, but then, I enjoyed my last bout of flu more than Cop Out, so let’s not pretend that that, in itself, is a recommendation. Red State is the film Smith has described as his foray into the horror genre, and it concerns a family sect of extreme right wing Christians (clearly based on Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church, which, oddly, also exists in the film’s universe). It never really feels like a horror film at all, and only one sequence seems to easily fit within the genre. Outside of this, Red State is more a political film than anything but, this being Kevin Smith, the discourse is frankly infantile, obvious, and stated in a way about as subtle as Smith sticking his thumbs in your eyes and bellowing his point at you for 90 minutes.

The thing that has always been said of Kevin Smith (often by him) is that he’s not much of a director, rather he’s a screenwriter who happens to direct his own work. Unfortunately, Red State shows him up on the screenwriting front and suggests that, outside of his comfort zone, Smith really doesn’t have the chops to draw us in with the writing. Red State’s much discussed centrepiece is a (very) long sermon by the film’s Fred Phelps analogue (Michael Parks). Parks gives it his all, with a nicely OTT fire and brimstone performance, and a regard for his young grandchildren that would be sweet, but set against this character becomes very creepy, but the sequence is deadly dull. For more than fifteen minutes, interspersed with the odd cutaway to his audience, Parks talks, or rather he preaches, the problem is that the speech is just very dry, and good as Parks is he just can’t inject much interest into it, certainly not enough to sustain it for as long as Smith wants us to sit there. The problem is also that this is basically exposition, and by this point we’ve already had a couple of scenes worth of very clunky exposition about what these people believe, so another fifteen minute monologue feels redundant and dull.

On the plus side, when Parks finally stops sermonising, this does become the film’s only really frightening scene; the one where Smith dwells in the horror of who these people are and what they are capable of. Unfortunately though, Red State is a rather unfocused film and, having spent the film’s opening 40 minutes building up a set of characters (the churchgoers and three local boys they have kidnapped) Smith promptly forgets about the kids he’s been asking us to root for and identify with and rather than the tight little survival horror it looks like Red State will develop into he decides that the film should become a commentary on Waco and other sieges like it.

Again, this section of the film is a mixed blessing. Though his character is ill defined (Smith NEVER, even when he asks himself to, comes up with a reason he behaves the way he does) John Goodman puts in a customarily excellent performance as the ATF agent in charge of raiding the church, and inside the church Melissa Leo ratchets up the intensity of her performance to a fever pitch. She also has a nice rapport with Parks; in one of the script’s few light moments that works she’s sent to fetch him some sweet tea, in middle of a huge gun battle. It’s a beautifully played exchange, laden with unspoken things between father and daughter. There is also a good performance from Kerry Bishé, who, if Smith could choose a protagonist here, would have been a good pick, with her ever more stricken and desperate turn as a young churchgoer who just wants to get her little brothers, sisters and cousins out unharmed.

But oh are there ever problems. The most pressing remains that the film just becomes boring for long stretches. Much of the last hour of the film is taken up by gun battles, but Smith has no real idea how to shoot them, and so the film is often reduced to just being a lot of loud noises. Perhaps the lack of geography to the violence and Smith’s newfound love of handheld camera are designed to throw us into this chaos, but it doesn’t really work, first because Smith is short on visual imagination, and the action just never really gets exciting and second because, with no real protagonist, we’re thrown from pillar to post rather than having someone to invest in and to be worried for, and that too neuters the claustrophobic, oppressive, atmosphere I think Smith is going for here.

There is little in the way of Smith’s trademark style of dialogue, but when it does crop up (largely in the film’s last five minutes) it feels out of place, out of character for the kind of people he gives it to, and like a last minute sop to his established audience. Outside of that there are some nice moments in the screenplay, with John Goodman getting the lion’s share of the good lines as he expresses incredulity to his superiors (and tells his wife, when they’re woken early in the morning, ‘if you loved me you’d make me coffee’), but they are only moments, and the script is overwhelmingly predictable and often clangingly, annoyingly, simplistic, with the exception of one scene with Kerry Bishé’s Cheyenne, Smith never even really tries to explore the churchgoers and their motivations (or lack of them), and most just become chess pieces to shoot and be shot at.

The performances are easily the best thing about Red State, and this is the area where Smith seems to have advanced as a filmmaker, as he gets good work from old hands like Parks, Goodman and Leo as well as the younger cast members, notably Kyle Gallner; so terrible in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and The Haunting in Connecticut and the aforementioned Kerry Bishé. The rest of the film is deeply flawed, and rather than scared or shocked I spent most of the running time feeling lectured. It’s not a total disaster, and it’s nice to see Smith stretch, but it just doesn’t come off as a whole.

4/10