9/21/07: Very Bad Things (1998)The Kingdom will be opening in theaters soon, and director Peter Berg is nervous. For good reason, too. The film’s conservative enough that we’ll be writing it up next Friday. That’s why Berg is trying to cover his tracks with quotes like this:
“I was nervous it would be perceived as a jingoistic piece of propaganda, which I certainly didn't intend,” says the actor-turned-director, hunched over an outdoor table at a shabby Santa Monica coffeehouse. “‘I thought, ‘Am I experiencing American bloodlust?’”Actually, the actor-turned director is thinking, “Are the critics going to burn me over
The Kingdom like they did on my directorial debut on
Very Bad Things, which had a great buzz but then got roundly panned once it was actually released and the media saw it was some fine right-wing trash?”
Maybe Berg isn’t thinking anything quite so detailed, but it’s close.
Very Bad Things was, in fact, warmly anticipated. The critics then rushed to declare that the film was a stodgy failure of a black comedy. To be fair, the marketing didn’t help. Check out the image above, which looks more like
Three Stooges Meet One Dead Hooker. That doesn’t change how the film is less a dark comedy than a deadly serious attack on godless self-absorbed creeps—and it landed shortly after a major Democrat was revealed to be a major-league sociopath.
Jon Favreau—then fresh off
Swingers—stars as a young stockbroker who heads to Las Vegas for his bachelor party. His four groomsmen are a banal bunch of co-workers and old friends. They call in an Asian stripper/hooker who ends up dead after an unfortunate accident in the bathroom of their hotel suite. The good news is that the hooker’s arrival had already put an end to the coked-up morons’ ramblings about fatherhood and politics.
Her bloody departure gets the plot going as real-estate agent (and cheerful anti-Semite) Robert Boyd—nicely played by Christian Slater—suggests that, instead of calling the police, the guys should “take a hold of the situation and review [their] options.” Boyd eventually sums things up like a true student of situational ethics:
The reality is, you take away the horror of the situation, take away the tragedy of the death, take away the moral and ethical implications of all the crap that you’ve had conditioned and beaten into your head since Grade One—what are we left with? What? It’s a 105-pound problem. 105 pounds that’s got to be moved from Point A to Point B.Then they have to kill a hotel security guard. As Boyd explains, that’s “not so much of a new plan as a modification on the old one.” The bodies are buried in the desert, and Boyd gives a little speech about how what they have done “is not a good thing—it’s clearly not a good thing—but it was, given the circumstances, the smart play.”
Peter Berg didn’t make the smart play. During this scene, every film critic in the audience was thinking, “Wait a minute! These guys aren’t wearing a GOP lapel button or anything that clearly marks them as Republicans! They’re, like, one of us!”
Or, really, a lot like the Clinton administration.
Very Bad Things provides great horror in very similar ways. There’s also an important technical innovation that can’t be discussed without ruining the ending. The political message, however, is spoiler-free. The groomsmen start to fall apart, and it’s no surprise how they try coping with their guilt. They’re suddenly discussing going off to join Greenpeace or entering the Big Brother program so they can help out with “the lack of racial integration.” In other words, they try to be good liberals to cover up their lack of human decency.
Like we said, we’re back in the Clinton administration—specifically, when President Clinton sent out Sidney Blumenthal to brand Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. In retrospect, hanging on to that stained blue dress was the best thing that ever happened to Lewinsky’s reputation. But we’re not supposed to discuss those things anymore, much like we’re not supposed to recommend
Very Bad Things. Berg might get off the hook with
The Kingdom, though. He's established now.
Make it your own: Of course you can
get the DVD for cheap. Haven’t you heard? The film’s just awful.
