Green Room

What a fun idea for a movie: a punk band gets trapped in a skinhead club and has to fight its way out in a sub-cultures battle to the death.  Yes, what a fun idea. . .but, alas, not a fun movie.  Instead we have a grindingly dull grindhouse throwback handicapped with Peter Dinklage-sized thrills and Angus Scrimm-sized gaps in logic.

The dreary failure of a film begins with the hard-up punkers taking a last-minute booking at a backwoods skinhead club. . .because. . .uh. . .because maybe Prussian Blue got held after school and had to cancel?

Anyways, apparently, for some reason, no white power band could be found to round out the bill, and, for some reason, the skinhead club manager figured a shite punk band would be better than nothing. . .kinda reminds you of the Sex Pistols disastrously ill-conceived US tour:

Anyways, the punkers manage to get through their show a lot better than the Pistols did at the Longhorn, and are just about to be on their merry way when one band member *remembers* that he *forgot* his cell phone. . .alas, as *fate* (or lazy script-writing) would have it, the absentminded punk blunders back into the green room to retrieve his mobile just as some skinheads are squabbling over the corpse of the girl they just murdered. . .oops. . .next thing you know, all our hero punkers have barricaded themselves inside the green room, seemingly at the mercy of their racialist hosts.    

There's no logical reason the skinheads, superior in number and superior in firepower (including attack dogs), couldn't simply storm in and kill all the punkers, and then dispose of their bodies and their van. . .but, for some reason, the head skinhead is worried that if he kills all the punkers and they are reported as missing, some of the skinhead crowd who saw the punkers play at his club might run to the mud people's police and tattle (apparently he knows in advance how little loyalty white supremacists really have, as the dumb script has several skinheads, for some reason, turn punk collaborators). . .

And, for some reason, it doesn't occur to the head skinhead that if all of the above were to occur, he could simply tell the mud people's police that yes, the punkers did play at his club, but once the show was over, they got into their van and took off, and that he has no idea where they are.  But no, the head skinhead, for some reason, has no faith in such a clean, simple solution, and instead insists on staging an incredibly elaborate, labyrinthian cover-up, which I doubt even the scriptwriter could explain. . .and thus begins the long, illogical tedium that is Green Room, as both punkers and skinheads make one head-scratchingly stupid decision after another, with neither group seeming to want to end this retard's version of a Mexican standoff.

[One small example of the stupidity and ill-logic of the script: there are two punkers left to kill, and, for some reason, the head skinhead decides it would be a good idea to send in two newby neo-Nazis to finish the job, and even though he has plenty of weapons at his disposal, for some reason, he sends in the newbies armed only with one gun and three bullets. . .??]

Well, plenty of thrillers have scripts with plot holes. . .but they are still decent entertainment. . .because they have plenty of thrills. . .and plenty of tension. . .and they are well-acted.  Green Room has no thrills or tension, just clumsily-staged fights that end in gore shots that are supposed, I suppose, to make the senseless suspense-less scenes seem clever.  But no.

The acting is crap, too.  Patrick Stewart plays the head skinhead in what, I suppose, is supposed to be a cool, quirky, contrarian fashion. The real-life skinhead's skinhead moves in slow-motion and speaks in such a soft, soothing, somnolent and pedantic style, he would make Mr. Rogers seem rowdy.  A dull villain--now there's a great idea for a thriller! 

A limey actress named Imogen Poots plays a skinhead girl-turned-punk sympathizer in such a glazed over, life-less way, she would make Jeb Bush look high-energy, she's a human dose of klonopin, killing off all cinematic anxiety. . . 

The rest of the cast is similarly shitty, none are convincing as punkers or skinheads. . .there's nothing in the least bit anarchic or racist about any of the characters. . .they all seem like the most uninspired RPGers imaginable. . .transpunks and transracists desperately in need of hormone therapy.

Green Room doesn't succeed on any level (even the sound sucks, with chunks of the dialogue completely unintelligible [though that may be a blessing in disguise]), and despite its incomprehensibly rave reviews, it's an amateurish effort, and surely one of the worst *best* movies of the 21st century.