A snuff movie

Rating: 1/10 (14 January 2007)

I looked up this film on IMDb before I started watching it tonight, the grade seemed pretty reasonable and the first reviews I saw seemed to say this was a great film and possibly one of the best things Denzel Washington has ever been in. Well I thought it was a bad film , Not because it was amateurishly made or badly acted, I just felt it was nasty.
The structure is typical of American revenge fantasies. First you spend some time bonding the hero to the character who will later become a victim of some crime. The more innocent the victim is or the more horrible their demise , the more the director can crank up the sadism later on in the movie.
The problem for me with this film is the hero seemed to be a lot sicker than the bad guys. He tortures his victims before killing them , cutting fingers off here , inserting explosives into rectums there, it's really nasty stuff.and yet there seems to be no sense that what he's doing is wrong, the camera seems to treat him as if he's a bit of a cool dude.
As well as this kind of cockeyed morality the construction of film it self seems to linger on the scenes of torture, I couldn't help feeling that this was a movie made by a sadist for other sadists , a snuff movie made for titillation.
The whole idea of setting up a situation in a film which allows the viewer to enjoy scenes of torture really creeps me out.