Pretty much a waste

Rating: 3/10 (7 June 2007)

I will tell you up front...I don't like torture movies. The very concept of films like Saw and Devils Rejects make me think that these films are really made for fan-boys and closet nut cases, and for the most point, they probably are.
Talked into watching this by friends who indicated that this was something more, and as some writers here seem to feel, the gore is not that bad. Oh well.
A lot could be said about this movie, but in short, it is a bit less on suspense and what there is of it is pretty much drowned out by lapses in logic. I liked the whole concept of Elite Hunting--not that it's original mind you, but an interesting thought in a place so far away. But the direction wavers and seems amateurish. The camera-work shifts between well done and rather boring--failing to sometimes pull you into the story. There is plenty of gore, and anyone that seems to say there isn't enough in here--I really wonder about them. Seriously, cut off fingers, toes, eyes gouged out, throats cut--but that's not enough. Geez, some people are pretty weird.
Key problems:
* The city is at once very pretty, then suddenly it's dark, scaffoldings, very young hoodlums (like 8 years old). You can argue that they went into the bad part of the town, but the seemed to be there in a moment. Is the whole town in on what it going on at the factory which appears a few hundred yards away, or do they wonder why the smokestack goes off in an abandoned plant....
* The girl gets highly paid to get the last guy into the torture factory. She even laughs that she got so much money for him. However, her meeting him to take him there was pure happenstance and luck--he wandered into the bar. Further, he had to drag out of her and twist her arm to take him there. Makes no sense, again, lazy screen writing.
* Some makeup is well done, some is really amateurish. Did the guy cut out the girl's eye with a torch?! Then, when she escapes, you can clearly see her eyelid with just a bunch of bad red makeup globbed on top of her eye. Sure, I might sound nitpicking, but man that jumped out at me.
* Some of the camera work was really questionable, and looked like really low grade film or video. And I don't mean the gritty torture scenes, but scenes outside. Many of the camera shots are basic setups with little tracking, movement or fluidity of any kind. Much could have been done by using the architecture to create tension and claustrophobia, but this is never used.
* The stunts were terrible. I especially liked the scene where our "hero" guns down the girls and the guy that set the thing up. First of all, how much speed could he possibly have gotten up to in 20 feet to be able to run them all over, AFTER they saw him? When they get hit it's like they had the actors/stunt people just roll off a car. When the surviving girl gets hit by the bad guys' car, they just stuck a dummy in front of the car and dragged it away. I wasn't looking, again, for blood and guts, but that was student film quality shots.
Most effort seems to have been put in the torture scenes, such as they were, and that is telling. I did like the look of the bald guards, the setup, and the completely insane American who gave you insight into what the whole deal was. And there was some satisfaction in the bad guys getting their due for the most part.
I cannot recommend this movie. Too dull, too depressing, and more gross than scary.
What REALLY disturbed me was the laughing and enjoyment people were getting in the torture sequences in this film. Not the hollers you get during a gross segment in a zombie movie mind you, where people are basically letting off steam. No, people seemed to actually be happy that people were getting tortured.
That was the only horrifying thing about this movie. I felt disturbed being in a room with such losers, and wondered what has happened to audiences for them to act this way.
Lastly, I figured out why this film had an amateurish edge to it, and that is after I saw a few interviews with Eli Roth, particularly one on Fox.
This guy has the depth of cardboard and is full of himself. Torture movies do well now, according to Roth, because of the torture at Gitmo and what the US has done to people around the world and its our collective outrage against that which makes these movies popular. Then more Bush bashing. He's a putz.
So we are not talking about a particularly bright bulb to begin with, and if you make the mistake I did and see this film, you will see what I mean.