It may be layered over with the cast of deep political significance, but underneath all that intrigue, the plot to poison McDonald's and kill hundreds of thousands of Americans enjoying a vacation, there is nothing much more than torture porn.
The performances are okay. Touriya Haoud, as the hero's Dutch girl friend, is a knockout. And Gina Torres, as Laurence Fishburne's doubtful but willing assistant, is sensual and suitably dubious of her own ends.
Fishburne and Torres are American agents posing as Moroccan terrorists investigating an international plot to poison hamburgers. No kidding. They must torture Ryan Phillipe, a Dutch terrorist, to get the names of others in his organization. That's the icing on the cake. The cake itself, the batter, the stratigraphy, the yellow color of Artificial Dye Number Five, is that in the course of their interrogation, Fishburne and Torres murder Phillipe's companion right off the bat.
Then, in an extended game of cat and mouse, they chop or saw off Phillipe's fingers one by one, while his horrifying screams fill the sound track. In between operations, Phillipe doesn't seem to have been much bothered between the improvised amputations, except that he's splattered with blood and has soiled his pants. But in the end, after his tormentors have actually convinced him that they approve of his plan, he gives away the information they want. He should have done it sooner, because it does him no good.
It's a pretty disgusting piece of crap. It panders to an audience that wants to see people tortured. There's been a lot of that around lately. Sometimes it's our side that does the torturing, as here, and in a television program called "24". As in, "We've got only 24 hours to get the terrorist to tell us where the dirty bomb is that will go off in the middle of New York City, and he won't cooperate, so torture is unavoidable, balanced against hundreds of thousands of innocent lives." I'm prepared to live with torture under those circumstances, provided that the interrogators call the Secretary of Defense on a hot line and get his endorsement so that accountability will be preserved. The reason I could live with torture under those circumstances is that I think we'd have to wait a thousand years before the moment arrived -- except in the movies and in political polemics.
I suppose torture porn is a natural point in the evolution of slasher movies. The fun lies not in the deaths themselves but in the anticipation of the pre-mortem pain. Rather like the sadistic goon Michael Madden in "Reservoir Dogs", fondling his razor, and describing to the captive policeman how he's going to make him suffer. Movies like "The Killing Gene", "Sawbones", and "Hard Candy" have the good taste to dispense with their lofty identities entirely and just give us good, old-fashioned American torture, right out in the open, keeping the viewer agape with tension as the time for the next physical assault grows nearer.
We're a funny people. American movies are scaling back on nudity and simulated sex. A few cable channels are beginning to excise unacceptable language again, as they did a generation ago. But torture porn blooms, not like a flower but like a freshly watered carnivorous cactus. And it's all very thought provoking too. The thought it provokes is: Why is it that so many of us enjoy seeing others scream in agony?
The performances are okay. Touriya Haoud, as the hero's Dutch girl friend, is a knockout. And Gina Torres, as Laurence Fishburne's doubtful but willing assistant, is sensual and suitably dubious of her own ends.
Fishburne and Torres are American agents posing as Moroccan terrorists investigating an international plot to poison hamburgers. No kidding. They must torture Ryan Phillipe, a Dutch terrorist, to get the names of others in his organization. That's the icing on the cake. The cake itself, the batter, the stratigraphy, the yellow color of Artificial Dye Number Five, is that in the course of their interrogation, Fishburne and Torres murder Phillipe's companion right off the bat.
Then, in an extended game of cat and mouse, they chop or saw off Phillipe's fingers one by one, while his horrifying screams fill the sound track. In between operations, Phillipe doesn't seem to have been much bothered between the improvised amputations, except that he's splattered with blood and has soiled his pants. But in the end, after his tormentors have actually convinced him that they approve of his plan, he gives away the information they want. He should have done it sooner, because it does him no good.
It's a pretty disgusting piece of crap. It panders to an audience that wants to see people tortured. There's been a lot of that around lately. Sometimes it's our side that does the torturing, as here, and in a television program called "24". As in, "We've got only 24 hours to get the terrorist to tell us where the dirty bomb is that will go off in the middle of New York City, and he won't cooperate, so torture is unavoidable, balanced against hundreds of thousands of innocent lives." I'm prepared to live with torture under those circumstances, provided that the interrogators call the Secretary of Defense on a hot line and get his endorsement so that accountability will be preserved. The reason I could live with torture under those circumstances is that I think we'd have to wait a thousand years before the moment arrived -- except in the movies and in political polemics.
I suppose torture porn is a natural point in the evolution of slasher movies. The fun lies not in the deaths themselves but in the anticipation of the pre-mortem pain. Rather like the sadistic goon Michael Madden in "Reservoir Dogs", fondling his razor, and describing to the captive policeman how he's going to make him suffer. Movies like "The Killing Gene", "Sawbones", and "Hard Candy" have the good taste to dispense with their lofty identities entirely and just give us good, old-fashioned American torture, right out in the open, keeping the viewer agape with tension as the time for the next physical assault grows nearer.
We're a funny people. American movies are scaling back on nudity and simulated sex. A few cable channels are beginning to excise unacceptable language again, as they did a generation ago. But torture porn blooms, not like a flower but like a freshly watered carnivorous cactus. And it's all very thought provoking too. The thought it provokes is: Why is it that so many of us enjoy seeing others scream in agony?