Green Room

2015 suspense

Rating: 11/20

Plot: A punk band, after playing for a crowd of neo-Nazis, accidentally witnesses the aftermath of a murder and is then trapped in the green room while the creepy owner and his minions attempt to clean up the mess. They try to survive the experience.

This was a big disappointment after Jeremy Saulnier's terrific Blue Ruin. It's violent enough and it's more than likely suspenseful enough. I wouldn't know about the latter because I was distracted with thoughts about how implausible the whole thing was. Well, initially, I was just annoyed with how Saulnier cheated a bit by making the villains a collective of Trump supporters. I mean, white supremacists. We don't know if they were Trump supporters or not. Patrick Stewart is quietly menacing, but he doesn't really do anything special, and the rest of the neo-Nazis were apparently just given the instructions to have "wild-looking eyes" or something. It's just not enough, so you have to lean on the "Well, they're skinheads, and skinheads are bad news" idea too much.

The biggest problems I had was that the characters so easily transformed into bad-ass action stars. Well, that and I didn't like any of the characters. I guess that was a problem, too. Sometimes, I can enjoy a movie like this because the bad guy is so nasty. Sometimes, I pull for the main characters because they're likable. Here, I didn't really like any of them.

The movie this reminded me of the most was Kevin Smith's Red State, another movie with a color in the title that I didn't like.