When people wind up in violent situations, they don’t react
with the steely competence of most Hollywood action movie protagonists. They
freak out, they mess up, and they pay for it. Which isn’t to say that they can’t
make the right choice – but sometimes you can make the smart plays and still wind
up dead. That’s how it is in Green Room.
A hardcore punk band playing a skinhead venue stumbles onto a murder scene, and
the people who run the club can’t afford witnesses. Trapped and barricaded in the
green room, the pressure-cooker situation gets worse and worse.
Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, subverted revenge-pulp movies by making the avenger a
soft-spoken drifter unused to violence. His incompetence, combined with
Saulnier’s immaculate sense of timing, lent every scene razor-edge suspense as
he blundered through murder attempts – his own, and those made by others on
him. Early on, the protagonist got a shave and got cleaned up – the
inscrutable, wild-man drifter beard went, revealing Macon Blair’s mild features – and
from then on we processed his actions not as the work of a crazed outsider, but
as deliberate and premeditated violence being carried out by someone who looked
like your accountant. A telling line from his sister reflected this shift: ‘I'd
forgive you if you were crazy, but you're not. You're weak.’ It was his choice
to enter the downward spiral of vengeance.
There is no such deeper goal in Green Room; its pleasures are entirely on the surface, but they are
many. Visceral, horrifying gore mocks the clean, aestheticized wounds of
typical action movies. The villains aren’t blustering or crazy, despite their Neo-Nazi leanings. They have their
interests, and they go about protecting them with a chilling, deliberate
efficiency – Patrick Stewart is underused, but excellent as the owner of the
club and leader of the skinheads, marshalling his troops to flush out the band
with all the resources at their disposal. There’s a surprising amount of procedural
detail – ‘soldiers’ wear red laces, they run a dog-fighting ring so the dogs
can be used as weapons here, police reports of a stabbing can be fobbed off by
finding two willing skinheads and having one stab the other and go off with the
police for it.
The painstaking details make the situation tangible and
immediate. The green room has been built so that there’s nothing but solid
brick past the ceiling and the four walls. How do they break out? How do they
overpower the lumbering doorman who’s holding a gun on them? Following the
changing calculus of the situation, weighing up their options for survival, and
trying to figure out what they (and the skinheads) will do next is as much part
of Green Room’s fun as the
almost-unbearable suspense and gruesome violence, as well as the black comedy
which arises from blunders and mishaps as each side does their best to kill the
other.
The eventual shift from siege movie to slasher movie spoiled
my enjoyment a little, bringing some of the old clichés into a movie which was enormously
refreshing for its realism and internal coherence, but it’s still a superb
genre piece – nasty, intense fun.
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