When a group of students invades their school with weapons and takes hostages, a girl needs to use her skills to save those in need.
Read that logline and let it sink in before you read further…
The film is well-shot and edited, and the actors do a decent job. The setup prepares you for what is about to happen; it shocks you when it does, but then it gives you all the emotional space you need to relax and “enjoy” something that is not meant to be enjoyable. Immediately, it seems like a corporate-industry-hostage situation involving pompous adult assholes that don’t matter if a few of them die in the process like unimportant stunts.
Then, from the first plot point, quite a few issues are raised:
- The van drove through the cafeteria’s front window, and no one heard smashing.
- The gunshots at the cafeteria that no one heard were firing.
- The relaxing verbosity after the van and the first shootings that lightens the mood.
- The parallel stories that take the focus off and go easy on the monstrosity that plagues the United States.
And these are just the major ones. The Die Hard missionaries and the 17 y/o female John McClane give this ongoing toxicity a sweet Hollywood flavour when no words can describe the horror of kids turned kamikazes at the place that is meant to be the starting point to change the world. I know that it is trendy nowadays to portray women doing extraordinary things, but there is nothing trendy or extraordinary about exploiting scenarios that have deeply scarred people’s lives. That applies to boys, girls, men, women, and non-binary people. Keep the trends for social media. People’s wounds are still wide open.
Elephant (2003), The Life Before Her Eyes (2007), My Friend Dahmer (2017), and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) are but a few films that have managed to capture that horror somewhat realistically. But they are well-made films. You wanna let horror crawl under your skin? Start with Bowling for Columbine (2002) and then go through the real-life mass shootings before and after. There has never been and never will be heroism in this ongoing heart-wrenching and soul-sucking tragedy.
Just death.
Followed by unspeakable, never-ending, inconsolable mourning.
P.S. You wanna know who funded this film? This is the first film for The Daily Wire, an American conservative news website turned TV/Film production company that, according to NewsWhip, is “by far” the top right-wing publisher on Facebook: “The Daily Wire is by far the top publisher among its peers in terms of engagements to its content, with more than 130 million Facebook engagements to its web content for the year”. Just saying…
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Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!
Stay safe!
