Hobo With A Shotgun

This was not Rutger Hauer's finest hour.

Well, let's be honest; Rutger Hauer's finest hour was declaiming "I've seen seabeams" shortly before carking it at the end of Blade Runner. He'd be weeping tears in the rain alright if he saw what had become of him a few decades later.

The main reasons I wanted to like Hobo With A Shotgun were that it was reputedly a superior version of Machete (which my wife says is good but I've failed to watch) and because it was filmed in Halifax, the Canadian city where I just got married.

Well, it was filmed in Halifax. One out of two's not so bad.

The whole thing is shot in gloriously oversaturated Technicolor, and the first few minutes of Rutger riding the railroad into town are quite pleasant. I could play spot-the-undisguised-Halifax-landmark and be amused by the ironic trashiness of it.

Then the gore started. I'm not sure if irony is a good enough reason to depict people being decapitated, eating glass, having a hacksaw taken to their throats or their chests hacked open. It's not as if there's really much of a story: it's just violence, violence, violence, bleak and nihilistic as it comes.

Conceptually, this is fine: it's the amusing dichotomy of calm Canada and the frenetic violence of 1970s exploitation films, jammed together. But exploitation films from the 1970s were mostly shit, and taking them and amplifying the violence doesn't make them better, it just makes a larger amount of shit.

Which is a shame, because the DVD box of Hobo With A Shotgun is a sweet bit of pop-up cardboard, but that doesn't really justify depicting a human pinata.

Perhaps I'm getting old and weak. There is a sort of social message (for all of 30 seconds) about society's treatment of the homeless. But it's in a wave of blood and guts so horrid that a school full of children being flamethrowered is one of the lighter moments. And through it all, Rutger wanders, bleary eyed and unshaven, as if he's the consummate Method actor, displaying disgust and confusion not just with the world at large, but with his agent for signing him up for this monstrosity.

There's no emotional pay off at the end; the whole thing seems pointless, an exercise for an ironist showing how unaffected they are by horror - look how foul I can be, mama! I suppose all this knowingness folds in on itself, so the guy filming hobo fighting is a commentary on the horrors of modern media, or on us for watching it, or a meta-comment on the film, or ... I'm really reaching here. I think the easier answer is it was just a steaming pile of (Canadian) ordure.