Sam Levinson's unpleasant Assassination Nation is a film that tries so desperately to capture the current teen zeitgeist it hurts your teeth to watch. After an extended tease sequence, where the lead protagonist, Lily (Odessa Young), informs us in quick visual succession, all the things we can expect to see over the next hour and a half ("Male gaze!" "Homophobia!" and such), the film brings us the rest of her posse, consisting of three other like-minded souls: Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Em (Abra), and Bex (Hari Nef), a transgender girl.
When someone starts hacking important town officials' online accounts, releasing the embarrassing contents for the world to see, the girls, like every one of their friends in high school, find it hilarious. But when the school principal gets hacked, losing his job in the process, and the hacker starts to turn on the rest of the town, including the now-panicked students, general pandemonium ensues.
Assassination Nation
68 Cast: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra, Anika Noni Rose, Colman Domingo, Maude Apatow, Cody Christian, Kathryn Erbe, Susan Misner, Jennifer Morrison, Bill Skarsgard, Joel McHale, Bella Thorne
Director: Sam Levinson
Rating: R, for disturbing bloody violence, strong sexual material including menace, pervasive language, and for drug and alcohol use — all involving teenagers
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Soon, it's revealed that Lily has been conducting a mostly online affair with her neighbor (Joel McHale), the married father of a young child she used to babysit. Lily is made the object of contempt and derision, but when other students start getting hacked, and Lily is falsely accused of perpetrating the attacks, the town forms an unruly, murderous mob to go after her and her friends. Like Purge, with a similar love of animal masks, bandannas, and cadres of high-powered weapons, the film quickly morphs into survivalist fantasy, with violent, blood-soaked battles eventually resulting in the four girls forming their own rampaging army, draped in red leather jackets and sporting an array of advanced weaponry.
Levinson's film isn't even satire, exactly; and it doesn't provide much of a sense of humor about itself. Clearly, it wants to be taken as a semi-serious diatribe about feminine empowerment -- Lily has a series of monologues on the nature of the customary role of females in an established patriarchy of cut-throat brutes -- but even the film's more strident polemics get washed away by the tidal wave of blood and gristle. It's fine to have women taking it to the establishment, striking a blow for feminist ideology, even if it's with a pair of scimitars and a high-caliber bolt action rifle, but at least have it mean something more than random humor and slick ultraviolence.
MovieStyle on 09/21/2018