A sadly relevant and just sad film about a hitman who kills some child sex traffickers in New York City. I remember seeing it a bit after it came out and they were talking about it on Blank Check film podcast, so I rewatched it.
Very weird and eery film, it’s quite hard to explain, but it’s not really about crime so much as the victims and the weird disassociation that you’d need to deal with being a victim of that stuff.
The plot is pretty simple, it’s one of those ‘inner life’ films where it’s more like a mood than a narrative. ‘Joe’ is a kind of hitman who goes and rescues the girls from these traffickers. The film starts after he has finished a job, he cleans up, and flies home. He’s a very scary looking guy, just really big and moves in a weird way.
He sorts everything out, flies home, and then we see him going home where he lives with his very old mother who is suffering from dementia so he has to look after her. Then he get a new job, we kind of see how it works, he meets his contacts, then goes to see his ‘boss’ who gives him the details, there’s a bit of proceedure, but it’s also just showing you how it’s this weird netherworld.
I kind of spoiled the plot, but one of the interesting things about this film is that although there is this intrigue which fascinated me a lot more the first time I saw it because it was just when I first heard about Epstein in 2019, it’s really about a person with a soul going into these demonic places. Theere is this dream quality to the whole thing, he is having these PTSD flashbacks and things that he imagines which implies that this may have happened to him when he was a kid, there are also Iraq war flashbacks (or some US colonial project in a desert).
In a really satisfying bit he goes to the brothel and brutally wipes them out with a hammer. Then rescues the girl. She is the daughter of a politician, but when he goes to the rendezvous to have her picked up, some corrupt police grab her and try to kill him.
He finds out that the politician has been killed and then it turns out all of his contacts, and his mum have been killed, he catches one of the hitmen and goes after the politician behind it.
There really does need to be a serious film about the whole thing that goes head on into it. God knows how they could do it, or who could do it. I guess that the best attempts at these films are the noir detective films. I’m not a huge film guy, the best one that I remember is Chinatown, (directed by Roman Polanski who was a paedo guy weirdly), I did read a couple of those noir books and there was a lot in those.
I was going to go into it, but I’m tired. I will just add that the acting, music, direction, pace, everything about it is brilliant. It’s a really atmospheric and dark film. There are some gory and some nasty bits, but it’s not exploitative or anything at all. The plot actually could be a cheesy action thriller, but there’s none of that, there is a lot of violence and it’s not for everyone, but it treats the subject with a lot of respect
The two films that spring to mind for me are Taxi Driver and Eyes Wide Shut. The way that I’ve described it makes it sound like Taxi Driver, but they are very different. There’s the fact that Taxi Driver is poor and everyone in it is just poor scumbags, although he does meet a couple of rich psychos in his cab, but Travis is also a younger and angrier guy.
Eyes Wide Shut is just about that bizarre upper class pervy world, and that is the theme, but it comes at it from a very different angle. There is the implication that they murder that teenager, but I think that is just part of the general bad vibes. I’ll have to watch that again, I haven’t seen that since I was young.
Ok, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been really getting interested in the insanity of the whole elite mafia thing. I have been listening to this podcast Ghost Stories for the End of the World again and it’s really activated my brain about how connected a lot of this stuff is. I want to start writing about this, but even these film reviews without research or anything take energy, I do have free time at the moment, but I’ve got addiction to internet shite same as everyone else and my living situation is shitty right now same as everyone else.
I’m going to move out to a small city and hate that instead.
But I want to start writing properly and try to put my thoughts together because there is this weird thing that I have in my head from what I know so far that I need to put some propr effort into, so I know that these flim reviews are just rambling crap, who knows, someone might actually read them all the way to the end, but they could be much better, so let’s hope lol
Overall: A rip roaring rollercoaster of a movie 5/5
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