The Killing Gene: Grade B

B

The Killing Gene (2007)

Stellan Skarsgård, Barbara Adair; Director Tom Shankland.

This British crime drama is violent, bloody, and brutal. There is torture, mutilation, rape, and lots of blood. I generally dislike gory violence and especially, torture, because it is almost invariably gratuitous – blood for the sake of blood. Pure sensationalism. But not in this film.

The idea is that a rape and mutilation victim who recovered and survived into adulthood wants revenge on the police detective and several others who failed to capture her tormentor. But the interesting thing about revenge is that it does not work. Let’s say you track down and kill the person who did you wrong. The perpetrator gets little or no satisfaction from that, and the victim of revenge typically feels anger but not remorse. Nobody is satisfied, nobody learns anything, and the project is a failure.

What if you just beat up and mutilate your tormenter? Same thing: It does not make you whole, and it is not a situation in which the tormenter has an inclination to remorse. Again it fails. I had thought that the perfect revenge movie could not be made therefore, but this one comes close.

The vengeant woman’s strategy is to capture her victim and, somebody that person loves. Then she tortures that person until they agree to kill the person they love to end the pain. That’s her revenge, to watch her tormenter suffer both physical and emotional pain the way she did. That might work, psychologically.

In this movie, she kills the victim after the victim kills the loved one, whereas it seems it might be better to let that person live with the psychological pain of what they did. That would be better revenge. And she not only kills them but mutilates them by carving messages into their flesh (before or after the torture is not clear). What sense does that make in the context of the revenge theory? Not much, so that mutilation aspect borders on the gratuitous.

Nevertheless, there is an overlaid story that she is or was a mad scientist of some sort who had studied the genetics of altruism and was interested in finding out if the genetic predisposition to care for your loved ones can be overcome by torture. That is a pretty weak experimental question, and in the final scenes, the victim and the loved one are not even genetically related. So overall the story does not make a lot of sense, but it is well acted, well photographed, thought-provoking, and I liked its new theory of revenge, so I give it a paradoxical B even though I dislike blood and guts movies as a rule.

Unthinkable: Grade B

B
Unthinkable (2010)

Samuel L. Jackson, Carrie-Ann Moss, Michael Sheen. Director Gregor Jordan.

I give this movie a weak B because it has the courage to address a difficult issue: American use of torture to interrogate terrorists. Is it wrong or necessary? The terrorist is domestic, an American Muslim (naturally) who has planted three nuclear bombs in three American cities. They will all go off in six days unless the US Government agrees to withdraw from “all Muslim countries” immediately. (Why that demand, and how it could be satisfied in time are glossed over). He is quickly captured. Apparently he wanted to be captured, but his reasons are unclear. “To make a point” is the best we can surmise.

Jackson is “H.”, some kind of ex-government black ops guy who specializes in torture. He is called in to do the dirty deed, and he does it with flair, in a great acting performance. His emotions are extremely well played as he alternately cuts off fingers then despairs for his decency. Moss is an FBI officer who is brought in for reasons unexplained by the story, but her character serves the purpose of expressing the average person's conscience. She is outraged and objects to the treatment given the prisoner, but she doesn’t do anything about it, because, well, those bombs are ticking.

So the simpleminded drama is a variation on the Dick Cheney formula: if there is a 1% chance of a terrorist attack like this, they you must take it 100% seriously and do everything possible, including (judging from history), ignoring your principles, values, and humanity to engage in torture. Moss’s character makes the liberal arguments: torture doesn’t work, the subject will tell you anything, it is dehumanizing, it is illegal, etc., etc. “H.” says only, “We have three hours left. What do you propose instead?”

It is a shame that the movie ends without resolving this conundrum. We are left to wonder: were the bombs found in time? Was the prisoner telling the truth? Does torture work? It seems like the filmmakers were too chicken to take a stand, or maybe they decided that the question is unanswerable, but I found the ending weak, unimaginative, and disappointing.

Only Jackson’s acting is worth watching. All the other actors are wooden, speaking predictable lines with predictable expressions, none of them convincing. Jackson however creates a true persona on the screen, creepy, but in a human way that the audience can connect to. It’s not a great movie, but it raises an important question that makes it worth seeing.

Rendition: Grade A

A
Rendition (2007)
Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Moa Khouas, Zineb Oukach, Yigal Naor, Meryl Streep, Peter Sarsgaard, Alan Arkin. Director Gavin Hood.

This didactic movie describes the U.S. government practice of “rendition,” in which captured terrorist suspects can be transferred, without judicial process, to a prison outside the U.S. to be tortured. As the president and the secretary of state have repeatedly said, “America doesn’t do torture.” This movie shows how that may be literally true. CIA agent Gyllenhaal merely observes torture conducted by an Egyptian ally (Naor). An Egyptian man living in America (Metwally) has been captured, hooded and “rendered” to Egypt for torture on orders from hard-boiled CIA boss Streep. His wife, Witherspoon, appeals to her senator (Arkin) via his aide (Sarsgaard) for intervention but gets the “classified secrets” stonewall. In a completely separate story, a young Egyptian man (Khouas) becomes a suicide bomber when his brother is captured and tortured by Egyptian police.

The film is well-researched, well-made, and very well-acted, especially by Metwally and Naor. Streep speaks her acid lines with perfection. Sarsgaard gives a nuanced performance. Gyllenhaal’s character is under-written, so there’s not much for him to do, but his silent head nods are as good acting as you’ll see anywhere. Reese Witherspoon gives an amazing dramatic performance. Directing is deft, cinematography fully convincing, and the music is outstanding. It’s a first class movie all around, except…

There are two problems. One is that the time sequencing of the two stories is so chopped up that it is very close to being incomprehensible. It took me an hour to realize there were two separate stories, and until the three-quarters mark to realize that most of what I had seen had been flashback. The ending scenes don’t make a lot of sense unless you have been taking notes on a yellow pad. Two stories were not needed. The main rendition story would have been more than enough. Whether this was botched editing or poor planning from the beginning, the disjoint timeline torpedoes both stories.

Extra-cinematic criticism is inevitable for this politically and morally sensitive story. The message is clear: the U.S. does not obey its own or international laws, tortures people, and lies about it. Lip service is given to the countervailing argument that we should thank the government for protecting us from terrorists by whatever means prudent. It would have been a better movie if Metwally’s character had been more ambiguous, not an innocent victim of an inhuman, racist, immoral government. It is a “Shame on you, America” message, and though very well made, its political point is bound to alienate many.