Blog From The Bench

I really like Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, and I am a sucker for a thriller. So naturally, I found myself in a Saturday showing of DERAILED. It's a rather dark violent movie, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a thriller or dark comedy. It straddles the line of being too violent and intense to be funny, but also too light and predictable to be truly thrilling. I'd say it's a good popcorn flick if rape, violence, and some questionable morality is okay for you. Anniston and Owen are hot together, and they certainly are easy enough to watch. Aniston is trying to ditch her Friends image, and Owen continues his tradition of playing a guy in a tough situation. Problem is the script makes them both so unsympathetic to the point where I didn't really like their characters.

Funny, but I think Kill Bill and Sin City have influenced even lighter fare like Derailed. Ultraviolence is everywhere these days, and human life seems to be less regarded by Hollywood in each major release. I was amazed that a largely suburban Saturday night megaplex audience full of people on dates, parents with children, and soccer moms sat through a flick with such a high body count without batting an eye. Forget Fatal Attraction, Derailed turns a possible one night affair in to a nightmarishly violent dreamscape of brutal beatings, rape, murder, and blackmail. There are tons of twists, but you'll see them coming from the start. What you won't see coming is how casually the film deals with these situations. Rape and murder are treated with an "Oh well!" attitude as if someone's karma ran over their dogma and they accept it as fate. Death and violence are just something these people accept as something to deal with like a car note or mortgage. Ah, the wages of sin!

For a popcorn flick it is engrossing. But it made me love A History of Violence even more because at least in that film the events affected the characters properly. Are we this jaded now? Apparently so.