Revenge of the Noble Savages

Rating: 2/10 (13 April 2020)

I gave this film two stars because although the story is garbage, it's beautifully filmed and the set design is absolutely brilliant. Kudos to the cinematographer and the set design people. That being said, I found the story to be trite, boring, predicable and disappointing. Caution, spoilers follow.
The plot is nonsensical, the characters are clichés, and I'm not sure I understand the message the filmmakers are trying to convey. Is the film trying to illustrate the shallow banality and institutionalized cruelty of the wealthy class and the devastating plight of the word's poorest folks? Those points are well-illustrated by the flood, the rich husband's treatment of his employees, etc... but beyond that, the plot settles into your standard, formulaic series of predictable events, portraying the poor family as stupid, rage-filled, murderous, half-wit psychopaths. Are the filmmakers trying to say that their murderous rage is justified or that poor people are just too stupid to understand the consequences of their actions? The poor family in the story are criminals, but they go about their criminal activity with all the calculation of an 8 year old. They are buffoons whose undoing follows a series of bad decisions, cons and assaults that are carried out with no forethought whatsoever.
This idea, so popular among the entertainment elites, that the rich are horrible people (excluding themselves of course) and that the poor are noble savages, seems to inform an awful lot of character motivation and plot development. It's a common trope here in Hollywood and I guess their overseas counterparts have learned from the best. If Hollywood has taught us anything it's that stereotypes and recycled stories are what the public wants. After all, filmmakers usually don't portray life as it really is, rather, they portray life as imagined by a privileged elite who write and produce this nonsense. From their perspective inside the bubble, Hollywood has spent billions of dollars over the years to bring us clichéd tropes such as:

"The hooker with a heart of gold who, by the story's end will be rescued by a rich, handsome millionaire," and,
"The wise, world-weary black sidekick, who guides the white protagonist and serves as his conscience, but who sadly must die near the end of the film," and,
"The white-savior schoolteacher who is determined to 'make a difference' and ultimately is able to 'reach her students' through a combination of white-lady-tough-love, mime work, hip hop and interpretive dance, transforming a ragtag bunch of inner-city HOC (Hoodlums of Color) into Rhodes scholars.

Maybe filmmakers outside the US have learned from the pros, and maybe they got it right, judging from the number of folks who rated this film highly and the fact that it won the Best Picture award.
On some level, I find this film offensive and am disappointed that so many have jumped on the bandwagon and rated it highly. Having personally known many wealthy people and many poor people, I cannot reach the filmmaker's conclusion that the rich are cruel and indifferent and the poor are stupid and violent. I've also, unfortunately, personally known several murderers. They were cold, unfeeling sociopaths and when you looked into their eyes you saw an abyss. Nobody home. But they were not motivated by righteous outrage at an unjust system. None of them were poor. They weren't rich either. From a socioeconomic perspective, all the murderers I've known were people who had decent jobs, plenty to eat, new clothes, cell phones, access to credit, all of them were white, and people they murdered were from socioeconomic backgrounds almost exactly like their own. I watched this film to see if it lived up to its hype. Sadly, it turned out to be just one more piece of garbage, no better than most of the junk made in Hollywood. What a waste of time.