Rampage
When
I was a young man, Steven Tyler warned me that we were living on the edge. That society had reached a moral breaking
point and we were fucked. I figured this
guy fucked in elevators and pierced cows’ udders and so he must know what he’s
talking about. I guess I should’ve taken
my advice from a guy who fucks on wheelchair ramps because the bomb shelter I
built just went unused as life moved on and Steven Tyler even took a step back
and realized that he had overstated the gravity of our social situation and
decided to stick to writing songs about his favourite colour (pink). A subject he understood. Actually, I think maybe that song was about
pussy, but he understands that too.
So
now after a career of making bargain bin exploitation films funded by gangsters
looking to launder money and get tax breaks, Uwe Boll makes Rampage, his
bold statement against the shallow greed and hypocrisy that he feels have
pushed mankind to the edge of something.
Like
all Boll films, the real star is the commentary track. And I feel he has really reached a new level
as an artist with this one. He no longer
directly responds to specific IMDB talkbackers in his commentary tracks, his
focus has become more geopolitical and macroeconomic. Like usual he compares himself to other
filmmakers, and the fact that they are recognizable names almost by default
makes them more talented than Boll. In
the past I’ve heard him compare himself favourably to David Lynch and Terry
Gilliam and it’s always funny because he’s so obviously not remotely in the
same league as these guys. This time,
since his film is about a guy who snaps and goes on a one man killing rampage,
he compares himself to Gus Van Sant and Joel Schumacher stating that he feels
he has made a film with more purpose and subtlety than Falling Down or Elephant
and maybe mankind is on some kind of edge because he is actually correct. Feel free to read that sentence again, I know
I had to.
The
main character is Bill. Bill is a short
skinny prematurely balding 23 year old minimum wage worker who lives in his
parents’ basement. He’s the type of guy
who might as well not bother holding his breath because life is not going to
pause from pissing on him. The film
features a lot of these same types of revenge of the angry customer
moments as Falling Down and both the characters in the film and Boll on
the commentary track mix it in with various political jibberjab.
Both
Boll and the main character, Bill, comment on how petty most people are in that
they get squeamish at the idea of the mass murder of a bunch of people who “don’t
matter in the big picture” but then Boll and Bill also get pretty fucking
upset over Starbucks not making their coffee to perfection. Boll draws extensively on his own life
experience, having spent years researching the ordering and drinking of fancy
coffee drinks.
Even
though Uwe Boll makes a good living filming Kristina Lokken’s oiled-up boobs,
he clearly identifies with Bill’s working class blueballed frustrations and
feels them himself. Boll said he wrote a
treatment and told the actors what he wanted to happen in each given scene and
then let the actors improvise most of the dialogue. This is probably the biggest
missed opportunity because on the commentary track Boll just goes nuts saying
things that I would’ve loved to have heard him work into the dialogue. Some of this shit would definitely rival Showgirls
for me not believing they could get an actor to say it if only Boll had typed
it up in conversational dialogue format.
At
one point the characters go to KFC for another one of these moments designed to
show us life is shit because crappy restaurants exist and we choose to eat
there. Boll starts talking about the
poor chickens and gets into pigs, although no pigs or pork are featured in this
film. Boll tells us how deeply he
sympathizes with pigs and is disgusted by how they are raised in little cages
and believes that each pig deserves five hours of frolic time a day. How he decided on five hours must come from
years as a pig whisperer or something.
He goes on to say that people in Africa contribute nothing and just suck
up our resources and should all be killed.
He also feels similarly about India and China. Boll’s mindset is also the mindset of Bill,
who feels his massacre is part population control. Bill delivers a monologue about how some
people have just got to go. That there
are not enough resources to go around and the rest of us “need more space”
and “more life” and will make room for these things by killing
others.
And
it is because of this that I actually think Boll’s film is in fact more
truthful than Van Sant’s or Schumacher’s.
I think Boll actually does understand, and is, one of these lunatics who
go on crazy rampages. Boll never
entertains any of the obvious superficial scapegoats such as angry music or
violent videogames and movies as being the causes of the rampages. Possibly because nobody would let Uwe Boll
use their music or footage from their movies in his movie, but still, Boll ends
up creating a character who is disconnected and deeply angry.
All
of the anger in Boll is very obvious from Boll’s commentary track. At first it is kinda funny that he introduces
every actor in this film by saying “Oh yeah, here’s this guy, you probably
recognize him from when he got gang-raped in my other movie” or “Here’s
Cindy, she’s great, she was a rape victim in two of my other movies”. But after he introduces half the cast this
way it starts to hit home how much raping this guy likes to film. But I guess that’s also a message to you
actors: if you want to work with Boll multiple times, you’ve got to do a rape
scene. There’s a pretty egotistical
moment where Boll mocks one of the actors in Rampage because he also
acts on Melrose Place: The Reboot.
Boll basically says “One minute you’re getting raped in an Uwe Boll
film and the next you’re on Melrose Place” with this tone of “Oh how the
mighty have fallen”. Maybe it’s his
clever spin on “One moment you’re winning an Oscar for playing Ghandi and
being knighted, the next you’re in an Uwe Boll film”.
Boll’s
rantings go all over the place. Whether
he’s demanding that Arnold Schwarzenegger personally kill people in real life,
or whether he’s talking about how Obama needs to put snipers in helicopters and
have them follow other world leaders around and control them under threat of
death, or whether he’s talking about killing everybody in one continent so that
pigs can have a nice playground, he’s an angry misguided lunatic and therefore
the most qualified to make a movie about an angry misguided lunatic. The result is a movie that is just fucked up
and not relishing how fucked up it thinks it is like the way Natural Born
Killers would throw all these silly filters and whizbang effects at
you. Rob Zombie seeing this movie would
probably feel like how an actually talented musician (not Rob Zombie) might
feel upon first hearing The White Album.
This film just might be Uwe Boll’s definitive statement as used in his
trial someday.
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