A Well Directed, Tasteless Snorefest

Rating: 4/10 (12 August 2017)

A Clockwork Orange follows a young man involved in a brutal gang who is used for an experiment that tries to cure his criminality.
Stanley Kubrick is one of the biggest things to appreciate about this movie. His directing is quite good. Despite everything else in the film, his work behind the camera was something I couldn't ignore.
In addition, Malcolm McDowell as Alex, the protagonist, is quite good. His performance only gets better as the movie progresses, making the last act all the better.
Speaking of the last act, it's pretty great. The direction it decides to go is fascinating, with all the stuff the main character goes through as a result of his past life, and it really says something on society as a whole, all the while not being too horribly blatant about it's message.
As far as the rest of the movie, it's okay. The first two acts are painfully boring, and even aspects of the third are too. I found little purpose in the tasteless display that the first chunk of A Clockwork Orange was. It was like the movie was trying to be both brutally edgy and artsy at the same time, but it forgot to be tasteful about it. So much of the movie is over the top for no real reason other than to be over the top. I read a little on the movie where it tries to draw a parallel between the movie's content and the experiments that Alex is subjected to, the parallel being the audience's inability to look away, but I found myself looking away from the screen far more than I have in a long time. I had no problem looking away and paying minimal attention to the film while I looked at my phone or watched the paint dry on my walls. The first two thirds are incredibly simple and frankly, rather uninteresting. It was unnecessarily drawn out and as a result I felt myself dozing more than once. The movie started out actually making me feel physically sick, which I thought was a good thing because that meant that I was semi-invested already (it was able to make me feel something genuine early on), but then it divulged into a boringly unoriginal story that I simply couldn't care less about.
Some aspects of the third act prove to be rather absurd as well. I know that I said earlier that most of it works really well and isn't overly blatant, but there's one scene in the movie that really doesn't make a lot of sense. It didn't need to be in the movie really. It involves two characters from the first act, and it felt kind of unnecessary. Like it didn't need to involve those two characters, it could've (and should've) been literally anyone else.
And the music is, while mostly good, overused to death. Most every track started to feel like a frustratingly obvious cop-out, where instead of showing actual characters and story we just got montages and narration to said tracks. And that music was all the same. It was like Kubrick could only get access to two or three tracks and recycled those over and over.
Overall A Clockwork Orange isn't my cup of tea. While the leading performance, directing, and final act are solid, the first two acts, use of music, and pacing were all lackluster. I've read reviews where people say 'you have to see the movie more than once to fully appreciate it' but I'm sorry that I can't stand the idea of sitting through this movie more than once. The artsy stuff all feels artsy for the sake of being artsy, and that's it. I'm not curious about what everything else means, it doesn't seem like there is any meaning to begin with. So in the end I personally wouldn't recommend this movie.