Hollywood Violence

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2009)

Once again, like some mangy old dog who refuses to die, Hollywood regurgitates past 'feasts' to pick through the stew of ideas and pull aside the morsels it considers to be worth digesting once more. The offerings aren't even warmed over any more though, and the result is cardboard tasteless. This woeful effort updates those American movies from the 80s (which were themselves updates of Oriental films from the 70s) in which a young protagonist 'finds' himself with the guiding hand of a wise mentor and a talent for cracking skulls.
Sean Faris plays Tyler our outcast hero, living with a mother he doesn't get on with and a precocious younger tennis-playing brother. Tyler's carrying a lot of baggage because his dad died after he let him drive drunk (a fact demonstrated with admirable subtlety by the large number of cardboard boxes he never unpacks when his reduced-size family moves house). Tyler didn't do anything to stop his dad getting behind the wheel you see, and sometimes doing nothing is the wrong thing to do. Same as sometimes you have to be true to yourself, and you have to accept yourself for who you are; you have to know when to make a stand and when to give way, and you have to roll with the punches and realise that right is right and wrong is wrong.
Did I miss anything? Oh yeah – you must never, ever, under any circumstances, back down
Tyler's mentor, a black dude who lives in his low-rent gym and only accepts clients on the condition that they won't use their fighting skills in the outside world (yeah, right) spends all but the last ten minutes of the film banging on about how violence is the solution to nothing before changing his mind. Turns out violence is the solution after all. (How stupid does he feel?)
The violence has to be Hollywood hot, though. You know the sort of thing: it must be performed by (and perpetrated upon) tanned and sculpted bodies in such a way that any resulting bruises will blend tastefully in with the owner's golden-fleshy hues. These injuries might cause a few stiff movements but won't prevent their owner from springing into retaliatory action the split-second their opponent leaves an opening. No blood, other than an occasional trickle at the corner of a mouth, must be seen, regardless of how many times we see a fist hitting its off-screen target with mechanical, piston-like ferocity. In short, it has to be sexy, surrounded by busty bikini-clad high school girls, and have all the nasty sights and sounds excised for the sake of the sensibilities of its mid-teen audience (judging by the aforementioned sanitisation and lack of expletives).
Everything about this film – other than the bad guy, who makes an impression – is very ordinary and totally unoriginal. Every now and then a few cheap philosophical platitudes are thrown into the mix in an attempt to add a little depth, but that's really just the writer going through the motions. The only difference between this film and its countless ancestors is the use of the internet