"I am the king of the swing!"

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2008)

I hadn't planned to watch Hostel, particularly after cringing all the way through Cabin Fever a few years ago - but after noticing that it was on TV, I decided to see what the fuss was about. Very quickly, I realised that my opinion of Hostel was going to be based pretty much solely on how I reacted to its portrayal of extreme violence, which in the event generated a sense of indifference I began to find rather troubling after a while.
Eli Roth's petulance is something to behold. If you don't like his films, you're "out of touch", apparently. Because this is art, yeah? It's metaphorical, yeah? It's probably symbolic of something too, maybe, probably, yeah? I don't know if this has occurred to Roth, but if he wants to claim that those trained, articulate, professional critics who bayoneted this film back in 2005 "don't get it", then maybe Hostel isn't doing its job properly.
I can, if I'm generous, see the basic genesis of some kind of artistic statement here that only goes as far as Roth's limited ability can take it. All the obvious touches are there that suggest a film trying to pass itself off as high art - dramatic reversal of roles, characters who talk in silly epigrams, that sort of thing - but Hostel never becomes the modern day Texas Chainsaw Massacre it wants to be by dint of being extremely badly written: the actors maul their way through dialogue that clunks like a broken clock, while all the time being characterised as weird cartoons. (A quick glance through IMDb's "memorable quotes" section reveals just how banal the dialogue is.) The narrative is just as shabby, as time and time again our hero is rescued in the nick of time by a chance event (such as a knock on a door) happening at exactly the right moment. After a while this kind of contrivance just distances me from a story that's supposed to suck me in and unnerve me; Roth lacks his mentor Quentin Tarantino's ability to present the Postmodern and therefore just comes across as crude and shoddy, rather than subversive and self-analytical.
I won't say much more, except that I'll grant one more star than Cabin Fever got because it doesn't strike me as being quite as smug. Ultimately though, if you don't get turned on by the extreme on screen violence, then there isn't much in the film I can recommend to you. If you do get turned on by the extreme on screen violence, then stay a very long way away from me.