Kubrick's arrogance in full flight

Rating: 3/10 (12 January 2010)

Kubrick has made some masterful films, highly regarded ("2001") or underrated ("Barry Lyndon" and "Eyes Wide Shut") but the only thing shocking about "A Clockwork Orange" is just how big a misstep Kubrick made. It's a hypocritical, pompous mess which has been idolised by the youth for its over-the-top violence and over-the-top language and hailed by others for its heard-it-all-before message.
After juvenile delinquent Alex (The admittedly excellent Malcolm McDowell) kills one person too many (with a statue of a penis with the other woman swinging a bust of his favourite composer Beethoven at him, oh the deliciously subtle irony of it all), he gets carted off to jail, snags himself the Ludovico treatment and is made to feel disgust every time he tries to act out on his violent and sexual urges.
Speaking of the violence, the majority occurs in the opening half an hour, and it would be shocking if it weren't for Kubrick's gimmicky treatment of it to add a cheaply ironic edge to it all. It just reduces the violence to a cartoon, all to smash us over the head with the fact that there's too much violence in society and we're as much to blame as the criminals for this. In effect, Kubrick has designed the film as a Ludovico treatment for the audience, but he made a complete mess of proceedings with the purposely hilarious violence: If you want to make a serious point about a serious issue, sometimes you have to put it in a serious context.
But it's not just the violence that is overused, Alex's voice-over simply takes away from Kubrick's storytelling abilities, ramming home every point that doesn't need to be spelt out for the audience, all until the pathetic final line of the film that's meant to be ironic but just comes across as incredibly cheesy. The worst aspect of the film? The horribly outdated synthesised soundtrack which adds another ironic tone to the violence, unnecessary, overused and just plain terrible. It all adds up to a pointless film that teaches us that violence is wrong, politicians will do anything to stay in power, prison can't always reform criminals and the youth are crazy, why tell us something we don't know already. It's not even the fact that Kubrick tries to let us come to our own decision, by purposely trying to make us laugh at the violence and then judging us for laughing at it, it's just hypocritical, forceful and downright pompous. You can't chase somebody down in your car, run them over then berate them for getting hit.
Overall "A Clockwork Orange" is a big mistake from a director who has thankfully made far better films with more subtlety and more trust in the audience. For films about the violence in society, I recommend "Badlands" which is better in literally every single way.