Well... at least it wasn't as bad as Saw

Rating: 4/10 (17 February 2010)

But it was darn close! Where as Saw had a ridiculous, contrived and terribly flawed plot, Hostel has... nearly no plot at all. The story is weak, the writing is weak, the characters are weak, and the idea itself isn't THAT interesting to stand on its own feet.
First off, I do understand that Eli Roth tried to do something a little layered, by setting the whole first half of the film in what seems to be the COMPLETE opposite of a horror film, and trying to establish parallels between the two halves. Problem is, the first part is so shallow, so forced and so dumbly crafted that the only thing it produces is boredom and annoyance. The characters remain perfectly flat and bi-dimensional all the way through, so pretty much ALL of the desired effect is gone out of the window.
Second, the proper "horror" half of the film is nothing new. Really, folks, this one came AFTER Saw; there's no ground being broken here, with the torture and the graphic violence. At least it doesn't even pretend to say anything deep or thoughtful, so no worries in THAT department. But the whole thing just comes across as ridiculous and satisfying. If the intention was to keep away from "torture porn", the film actually handles it quite well for a while, but then we get a completely idiotic, LONG shot of the main character cutting out a girl's gouged out eyeball. It's like the film gave up all hopes of being gripping and disturbing, and went straight into "X-Treme Looney Tunes" territory once and for all. And what comes next is even worse. At least it gets sort of exciting towards the very end, but the aftertaste is horrible: the empty feeling of having wasted so much time in such fickle, fake pleasure.
At least you can draw parallels between the film's both halves and US, the audience; in one hand, it seems like the Hungarian red light district seems like a much more satisfying and life-enriching experience than this film; and on the other hand, we OURSELVES are the victims of cinematographic torture, except we are the ones paying for it.
At least I didn't pay for it.