Ok - Flightplan sucked.  It was bad beyond measure.  Words can’t describe how stupid the thing was.  So when I got another invite to another movie, I figured that it couldn’t POSSIBLY be worse than Flightplan.  I got the call to meet friends for A History of Violence at Regal (usually I prefer Cinama Center in Palmyra, but I wasn’t paying, so I wasn’t complaining).  Forewarning:  Spoilers present starting in the fourth paragraph.

The movie has gotten incredible reviews from all over the industry.  Film snobs everywhere have united in orgasmically gushing praise of what they consider to be the single greatest piece of cinama ever conceived.  Reviewers have committed suicide because they felt they were unworthy of living after having witnessed such an amazingly flawless piece of art.  Theaters everywhere report that patrons have gouged out their eyes upon exiting the theater so as to never see anything inferior to A History of Violence ever again.  You get the idea; people love this movie.

The basic premise of the movie is that small-town diner owner Tom Stall kills two would-be burglars / murderers.  Because it’s impossible for anyone from the midwest to kill another human being, this causes a national media uproar, which in turn causes some Scary Men In Black Suits to visit the restaurant and look threatening.  The trailers lead you to believe that there’s some identity confusion here; maybe Tom Stall isn’t who he says he is.  And we know from previous movies that when those suggestions are made, a plot twist is about to come down the line.  Is Tom a schizophrenic murderer who is merely hallucinating the whole restaurant and midwest life?  Is he someone evil, trying to hide his past?  Is he in the witness protection program?  Or did he really simply defend his property from would-be burglars?

The problem with the movie is that there is no plot twist.  What you think is going to happen, happens.  How you expect the movie to end is how it ends.  In fact, there really isn’t even a plot.  Their production meetings must have gone something like this:

WRITER:  “But how are we going to go from the big restaurant shooting scene to the tender at-home family scene?”
PRODUCER:  “I know!  Just write in a 30-minute sex scene!”
WRITER:  “Brilliant!  But how do we transition from the family scene back to the school scene?”
PRODUCER:  “Another sex scene!”
WRITER:  “Brilliant!  Nobody will EVER see that coming!”

The movie has two impossibly gratuitus sex scenes that don’t tie into the plot at all.  There’s an 8-minute shot of the leads … uh, “talking” to each other.  Not that I’m a prude or anything; the scenes just don’t fit, and they’re badly done to begin with.  You know how on reality shows, when the host is about to announce who gets voted off the island / boat / house / plane / cow / etc, they do a series of uncomfortably long closeups of each character’s face?  Imagine that stretching out for 8 minutes, but with two people and really bad dialogue.

And for the first half of the film, there’s this running subplot about the lead’s nice-guy son getting harassed by members of the school baseball team.  It’s a pretty revolutionary plot concept, one that’s never before been attempted in any story, ever.  Especially not within the last, say, 30 years.  I am not making this up when I say the script looked something like this:

[SON makes the winning play by catching the ball]
SON:  “I caught the ball!”
JOCK 1:  “I’m gonna kill you, faggot.  You’re a faggot.  Faggot.”
SON:  “Don’t fight me!”
JOCK 1:  “Faggot.”
[LATER that day, in school hallway, SON & his girlfriend are talking]
SON:  “Well, I’m going home now.”
JOCK 1:  “Hey faggot, I’m gonna kill you.  Faggot.”
JOCK 2:  “Yeah, faggot.  Haha.  Stupid faggot sissy faggot faggot head faggot.”
JOCK 1:  “You hear that faggot?  I’m gonna kill you, faggot faggoty faggot faggot.”
[LATER that night, SON & his girlfriend are sitting in front of LIBRARY]
SON:  “What do you think people did for fun 50 years ago?”
JOCK 1:  “Faggot!”
JOCK 2:  “Sissy faggot faggot faggot pants faggot faggot sissy faggot.”
SON:  “What are you doing here?”
GIRLFRIEND:  “LET’S JUST GO, it’s not worth it!”
JOCK 1:  “Yeah, you faggot faggot faggot faggoty faggot faggotest faggoty faggot”
JOCK 2:  “You should kick his ass, that faggot.”
JOCK 1:  “Faggot I’m faggot gonna faggot faggoty faggotest faggot.”
JOCK 2:  “Faggot.”

… And this goes on and on and on for the first half of the movie.  The kid finally beats the crap out of both jocks; I cheered, but only because it meant they finally killed that subplot off.  When the kid gets home, his father yells at him for it, and that’s the end of it.  It never surfaces again.  We wasted a combined total of at least 30 minutes of screentime on the stereotypical jock-vs-academic-kid confrontation, only to abandon the idea 45 minutes into the movie (the other 15 minutes were filled with the first sex scene).  It’s like reading one of Dean Koontz’s earlier books where he spends the first 32 chapters building up a character, then kills her off and never mentions her again.

So now that we’ve got the obligatory jock confrontation out of the way, the movie can actually go somewhere.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t.  There has to be another 18-minute sex scene between the same two people as before.  Only THIS time, it’s filled with clever and witty lines like “I didn’t get a lot of THAT in highschool!  LOL OMG!”  63 minutes into the movie and pretty much nothing has happened.  You’ll get more excitement and plot twists sitting at CPD for an hour.

We see a 6-year-old get shot in the head, then a coffee pot gets smashed, and the next thing you know the son is kidnapped.  All of a sudden we’re in Philadelphia, because Tom is really Joey — OR IS HE!  Except that he really isn’t Joey — OR IS HE!  Yeah, he is.  There’s absoultely no confusion there, largely because there’s no plot to get in the way of the stupidity of the movie.  The guy is a mobster from Philadelphia who abandonded his mob ties 20 years ago, disappearing into the midwest US.  There’s no mistaking it.  The only time you might possibly be unsure of this is while watching previews for other movies.  FOR CHRISTSSAKE, the DAMN TITLE gives the movie away!  Even the Sony commercial that ran before the movie had more suspense.

I’m going to see North Country when it comes out in a few weeks.  It doesn’t seem like it could possibly be bad, but given my success rate with flicks in the past week, I’m expecting it to turn into a musical half way through.  Maybe the mine will turn out to be OMG AN ALIEN and John Travolta will have a walk-on part with some oversized nose ring again.

Come to think of it, Battlefield Earth was actually better than either Flightplan or History of Violence.