So over the weekend, I watched “Hobo With A Shotgun”. It wasn’t much worth writing home about… I’ve seen GWAR videos with better special effects, Michael Jackson videos with better dialog… and yet…
Well, given that it wasn’t much worth writing about, I wasn’t really planning on writing about it. Sure, it had a nice monologue in a place or two, a really funny scene the first time the hobo confronts the evil son, and a surprising decision to rip off “Man of La Mancha”, of all sources, for a subplot… but, much like Bubba Ho-Tep, it has a plot that is a lot more fun to describe to other people than to actually sit down and watch.
But then I read a comment of Rufus’s on Gach’s Iron Man thread on the front page:
Meh. Seen a bunch of these superhero movies now and they just strike me as proto-fascist Dirty Harry nonsense with tights.
And I remembered the conversation we had about superhero stories resorting to violence to resolve problems. I’m going back through all (most?) of my superhero movies and seeing that “The Authorities” in them were either A) Incompetent or B) Corrupt. When I think of more fascist stories, I think of stories that call for everybody to come together so that they can impose their order on outside groups but, for the life of me, all of the superhero stories I’m trying to come up with now involve some variant of the hero saying to the bad guy “why can’t you leave people alone?”
And then, in the case of The Hobo With A Shotgun, he shoots them.
A deeply nihilistic movie with just-above-high school quality of special effects with a just-below-high school appetite for violence. I was surprised by how stupid it managed to not be, when it put its mind to it. Definitely avoid this one… unless, of course, the above sounds like exactly what you’ve been waiting for. In that case, you’ll only be slightly disappointed.
So that’s what I’m not recommending for you this week.
“One man with courage makes a majority.”
I said that to Maribou in my mini-review to her and she said to me “You know that’s not actually true, right?”
Well… yeah. It still makes for a surprisingly robust skeleton for a movie.
“…I’ve seen GWAR videos…”
I’ve seen GWAR… live.
True story.
Hobo WIth A Shotgun sounds like Snakes on a Plane: One of those movies where the title was thought of first and was so amazingly brilliant that everyone assumed their work was done and just mailed in the writing, acting, directing, and everything else.
“How can it possibly fail? It’s called HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN!!!”
That’s why I picked it up, put it back down, then picked it up again. How bad could it be?
As it turns out, not as bad as it could have been but… goodness, it wasn’t good.