Overall Rating
  Awesome: 61.29%
Worth A Look: 19.35%
Average: 12.9%
Pretty Bad: 0.81%
Total Crap: 5.65%
8 reviews, 76 user ratings
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| Chopper |
by Greg Muskewitz
"The ultra-violence is sickening and disturbing."
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As yet another in the ongoing series of presenting "cases" in which we are to look at monsters and recalcitrants of our society or other's societies, fictional or not, with a kind and forgiving or understanding eye, "Chopper" is the newest to be showing locally. (For more of the same, see "Hannibal," "Blow," "Requiem for a Dream," "Quills," etc.)Mark "Chopper" Read (Eric Bana) is Australia's most famous criminal, and the movie, acknowledgingly pointing out, doesn't necessarily stay within the realms of fact. The movie traverses through time mostly in the Seventies and Eighties, when he attained his cult status. Jailed only for a botched kidnapping attempt, he is constantly in trouble or provoking violent fights and/or murders. However, he lies his way through most of the stories and instead gets away with no punishment, so until the occasional run-in with the police, he is free to use his discretion on "disposing of human filth." And when imprisoned during one of the later run-ins, he writes several books, which become best-sellers ("I can't even spell") and makes money that way.
Writer/director Andrew Dominik is but another forgettable name in the recent onslaught of vomituritious visual over-stylization, soaking the negative of every scene in some variation of a gritty distilled and saturated yellow, blue, green or strobe-like mix. The movie is reared on violence, and loves to show you specifically how much pain Chopper can absorb (multiple stabbings, ears being cut-off) or inflict. (Believe me, Dominik gives you the opportunity to trace every splatter of flood, every molecule of flesh.) The effect is one of great perversity, which is largely grotesque, disturbing, sickening and sensationalistic. Meanwhile, next to all this ultra-violence, Dominik is still trying to play on the humanization side of Chopper and his schizophrenic behavior. (I.e. After each murder, he is usually very upset and apologetic.)
I suppose one might be intrigued by that form of schizophrenia and what might possess him to have done all this, but there are no explanatory explanations offered, much less elaborated on. This is sensationalism at its most offensive and disgusting stage. Why did the police have no interest in him? Why wasn't more precaution taken with him? I can also see how Dominik interjected some humor into the movie, but it doesn't come across when you're watching the movie; at that point, the only reaction there is room for is repulsion. Only after you've seen the movie does any of the humor really come across, but by that time it isn't funny --its dubiousness is still clipped by the insideousness of the rest. And it's just lame.
I can't say much about Bana, from whom a lot of praise was rewarded to for this role. A stand-up comic in Australia, I'm sure this was a change of pace, but he is good at emulating the dumbing hulkiness of Chopper, that I can help but believe that it will give him ample opportunity to explore any other acting itches. I admit, I wouldn't mind seeing him in something else, nor would I mind seeing some of his stand-up, but I would in no way go out of my way to catch any of this. His own boyish grin was too much innocence for any one element of Read. I am not so readily quick to dismiss Dominik as an awful, hack director in only his first feature yet --if only for his choice on who to make his movie about-- but he is a far way off from achieving any distinction outside of that group of Guy Ritchies, Mary Herrons, Mike Figgises, etc.
http://www.landmark-theatres.comFinal Verdict: F.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4357&reviewer=172
originally posted: 04/30/01 09:28:25
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For more in the Australian series, click here.
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USA
11-Apr-2001 (R)
DVD: 13-Nov-2001
UK
N/A
Australia
03-Aug-2000 (R)
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