Madness and Mayhem ahoy
Rampage Review
Welcome to the 2nd part of my Boll Double Feature. Tonight we have Rampage, a movie which appears to be another murder mayhem feature. We’re being promised a dude with a Kevlar Ned Kelly style suit killing everything around him because he’s a loser who snapped, so let’s see how we go.
We open with a man setting fire to some stuff in a drum, and a car bomb hitting a police station. Cut to opening credits and a “2 days earlier” message, and we meet the man in his room working out, and having flashes about the stuff happening 2 days from now. You know, the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Still, we’re 3 minutes in and nothing particularly dumb has happened yet so I’m feeling slightly optimistic.
Let’s meet the parents shall we? As the young man (Bill) and his parents have breakfast, they discuss him moving out, and the various deals they made about him saving up to move out or go back to school, or both. As they agree to talk about it in depth after work, I realise we’re now 8 minutes in and we’re getting scenes of actual character development. So far nobody is being stupid-this looks like a normal family with normal issues, and the actors are doing a reasonable job of it. Not what I expected at all, but I know how Mr Boll operates, so I’m going to guess that around the 15-20 minute mark we’ll hit something wall-bangingly stupid and the world will be right again.
Off to a coffee shop, will Bill argues with the guy who runs the place over just what a macchiato is, refuses to pay for it, and storms out to work. There we see that he’s apparently a decent mechanic, but he makes fuck all and his boss doesn’t like him too much. This is all giving us some solid character development for Bill, as well as introducing the people who are probably going to be killed off later on. As an aside, I should probably point out that none of the people Bill’s firing up at are being unreasonable-they’re just doing their jobs, and Bill’s attitude is rubbing them the wrong way. Toss in a brief radio flash about how mass murderers “Don’t usually snap just because they don’t like their job-feelings of shame and humiliation play a large part” and we’re getting a decent setup here. It’s really quite surprising, and if this was anyone but Uwe Boll at the helm I’d probably be settling in for a decent movie instead of waiting for the shit to hit the fan.
Cue lunch with Bill’s friend Evan. Evan comes across as a kind of pathetic wannabe social activist with his comments about how the world needs change, and how people are conditioned to just want big bank accounts and such. Bill points out that Evan’s all talk and no action, and it’s hard to disagree. In other news, Evan has two packages for Bill, who’s been ordering lots of stuff that he doesn’t want his parents to see. So he's ordering it all in Evans name and getting it sent to his place. That night, he tells his parents he’s got a big announcement for them in the morning and starts assembling piles of body armour and armoured plates in his room while listening to Evans video blog, interspersed with random quotes from shows about serial killers, mass murderers and the like. At this point, I start to get the feeling that Bill isn’t going to snap- he’s already snapped, and he’s been planning this for a while now.
As an aside, this is 22 minutes in and nothing majorly dumb has happened, so I lost my bet with myself. Boll’s really bringing out the surprises with this one.
Now, while Bill’s training and assembling his armour, we start to get pieces of what look like Bill’s video message to the world after his massacre, and that sense that he’s been planning this for a while is really starting to sink in. He also starts printing very fake dollar bills off his computer, which seems a little odd but lets see where hes going. If they didn’t keep repeating the same few phrases over and over again this scene would probably be a lot more effective, but it’s still fairly well done at this stage.
Breakfast the next morning, and Bill announces to his parents that he’s going to start applying to technical colleges, and the news is received fairly well. The now enthusiastic family breaks for work, and the only problem is that the audience knows that Bill is lying out of his arse right now. Which is fine, since we’ve already been shown that Bill has been plotting this for ages, and has probably only said this to keep his parents off his back just a little while longer.
And the massacre begins! At only 30 minutes into an 80 minute film, I’m a little concerned about how we’re going to spend the next 50 minutes, but let’s run with it. The film’s been fairly decent so far and…wait, Bill just drove a bomb filled van by remote control into the police station. He speeds off as the van goes up, taking the police station and what looks like several city blocks with it. It’s all actually quite silly and Bond-esque, but quickly forgotten as Bill gets out in another part of town and just starts gunning down everyone he sees.
Lots of dead people later, he ends up at the coffee shop where he demands a macchiato, gets it, then shoots the store owner for not making it properly. We immediately follow this with a visit to the hairdresser where Bill gets some water, walks out, then changes his mind, walks back in and kills everyone. Next is the bingo parlour, where he gets some lunch, tries to get everyone’s attention, then just wanders out shaking his head. Not sure what the point of these scenes are, and they feel like Boll has realised that kicking off the carnage early means some major padding is going to be required to take us through. This is not a good sign.
Now for a bank robbery, where Bill takes all the money, runs back to the car, gets some petrol and burns the money declaring that it’s worthless. I would be calling this a shameless riff of The Dark Knight, until I realise that Bill printed off lots of fake money before. Which, if that’s what he’s burning now, makes this whole thing a really psychotic bank robbery.
Meanwhile, Bill gets a call from his mum, assures her that he’s at home and ok, then heads off to meet Evan for the paintball session they planned. On the way, he stops to pull a roadside bombing on the sheriff and some cops who weren’t in town (it’s ok, he had a police radio scanner thing that all movie criminals have, so he at least knew they were coming), and leads the sheriff into the forest. And promptly stabs him, leaving him to bleed to death while he runs off to meet Evan and show him the money. He then tases Evan, sticks his gun in Evans hand, shoots him in the head, then dresses him in the body armour and runs off to burn his clothes and go home. He and his family have a brief moment about how they all thought Evan was strange but not killer strange, then Bill takes his money as we close on text saying he vanished that night, and posted his video message about keeping the population down 2 years later.
Well, I’m not sure where to go with this one. Basically, it’s one of those movies that plays “Gotcha!” with the audience. Except that everything pointing towards the twist ending was actually foreshadowed throughout the movie. Bill having his packages sent, apparently in Evan’s name to Evan’s place, the fake money, telling his parents he was home; it is all there, even if it only comes together at the end.
Personally, I’m gonna say this actually makes the movie worse. All the build-up to Bill being a nut trying to justify his own anger issues was actually well done. The actors were trying to act for a change, the writing was fine, and it all worked. What we got instead was that Bill is just full-bore sociopathic and after money, which, given all the lead up was “what makes a man kill?” is disappointing. It just makes the movie pointless, instead of trying to convey an actual message.
Still, this is easily the best film Uwe Boll has ever made. Soldily B grade, which is a marked step up from anything he’s done in the past. Still, since this was much much better than I gave it credit for, next week I’ll look at the movie that started me down the path of Boll-Watch: House of the Dead. I assure you, that one will be much more entertaining to get stuck into.