Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Assassination Nation

It has "ass" in the title.  Twice!  What the fuck did you expect?  A modern classic?!

High-minded - and likely high - college kids and social justice warriors of all ages will shudder in righteous climax watching Assassination Nation, an indie flick about four high school girls (sorry, wymyn) who get to kill their White male oppressors in an orgy of justified bloodletting and power dynamics sheet-balancing.  They'll be so busy drenching theater seats and, soon enough, couches alike that they'll completely miss that while Assassination Nation asks some outstanding questions, it answers them with the intellectual incisiveness and emotional intelligence of a sub-frat boy guttural grunt.

Is privacy dead in the Digital Age?  Does the toxicity of social media outweigh its potential for inclusivity?  Can a group of high school chicks be considered cool in 2018 if it doesn't include a transsexual?  Assassination Nation wants inquiring minds to want to know . . . and it wants them to tow the bleeding edge, socially conscious party line, or it'll blow their fucking heads off.

With all the subtlety of a bloody tampon hurled at a guy who dared to pull the chair out for his date, Assassination Nation takes place in the suburb of Salem in which our four heroines are subjected to a modern day witch hunt after one of them is accused of stealing and leaking all of the phone and Interwebs histories of 17,000 townsfolk.  The real Salem "witches" were powerless, mostly women.  These four, not so much.

They appear to be at least middle class, meaning that while they're all Hollywood thin none of 'em are missing any meals.  They all have nice clothes and the latest cell phones, and they have cars and cash at their disposal.  Lily (Odessa "Oh Very" Young) is the virgin/whore; she's only fucked one guy, but she's having a long-term emotional affair with a much older, married dude.  Sarah (Suki "Dookie" Waterhouse) gets called a slut by her friends and bemoans getting choked on the first date by her various Tinder hookups.  Em (Abra "Cadabra") is allegedly not just the "token Black friend," but I'm having a damnably hard time remembering anything meaningful about her.  Bex (Hari "LGBTQIAEIEIO" Nef) is the M2F trans one who seems to be accepted by everybody in the entire community except for three or four meathead jocks.

Giles and Martha Corey they ain't.

September 28, 2018