Postal

Starring: Zach Ward, Dave Foley, Jackie Tohn
Directed by: Uwe Boll
Written by: Uwe Boll and Bryan C. Knight
Studio: BOLL KG

We all know who Uwe Boll is, no introduction is necessary. Nor does one need to preface a review of any of his movies with anything but "This comes from the guy that directed Alone in the Dark". From that alone you know you're in for some brain damage.

What you probably didn't know, though, is that Uwe Boll can be fairly entertaining on his own - especially when he's drinking a 40. I got to witness as much when I attended the free CSW screening of Postal. I also got to learn that Mr. Boll is, in fact, apeshit and thinks of himself as a maverick filmmaker fighting the good fight against those "fat executives in Alabama". That's right, Alabama.

Postal is the next, and possibly one of the last, detris-ladden installment of the Uwe Boll Video Game Super Fun Action series and, I have to get this off my chest as early as possible, the first act of the movie contains some of the better directing he's ever done. Kudos Uwe, it's still totally unimaginative and conventional, but at least we got to see the principal characters in principal shots minus any inserted video from the original game (a la House of the Dead) or see supposedly dead characters start to get up while the film's still rolling (a la Alone in the Dark). But the rest of the movie is shit: shoot out after shoot out, bad delivery after bad delivery, and what can only be thought of as the single worst homage to Casablanca at the end, which was almost immediately preceeded by a "homage" (i.e. a demonstration in Boll's arrested directed ability) to Boll's mindblowingly longwinded final us-vs.-them scene in House of the Dead.

Direction aside, the movie's story centers on the main character, Dude, not to be confused with this upstanding fellow, who is having a really really bad day. I mean, a really really really REALLY bad day. So bad that more than a third of the movie is devoted to just showing how bad of a day he is having, rather than adulterating such scenes (e.g. Dude having a shitty job interview, Dude getting harassed by a guido and even Dude escaping a massacre at the welfare office) with, you know, plot. That's not pacing, that's just Uwe. I guess you could say the movie's ultimately about Dude's transcendence of trailer-trash life and his acceptance of life as a badass, but that's getting way too analytic for something like this.

To be fair though, there is a plot to Postal: the Taliban wants to stick Bird Flu in some very sought-after dolls and eliminate the Western Hemisphere in a plague-to-end-all-plagues while Dude's cousin, a charlatan that runs his own religious compound, wants to get his hands on the very same dolls so as to sell them on eBay and pay off one million dollars in overdue taxes. Once Dude formulates and executes a heist for his cousin and, simultaneously, Osama bin Laden's forces encroach on the same German-themed amusement park (where the last order of dolls rest), the two bands of thieves collide - HILARITY ENSUES. Not really. Just a bunch of violence and boxom broads running around with guns and bad child-murder jokes.

You see, that's what's wrong with this picture, and much of what Uwe produces. Yes, we all love tits and explosions, along with some trashy jokes - that's an integral part of the escapism of postmodern cinema (I find). Sometimes, goddammit, we don't want grand, enlightening themes or characters we can easily assign simple normative values (+/-) to. I mean, fuck, we just want to see characters have fun and give into some baser but ultimately more natural inclinations. But that doesn't mean we'll swallow brazen images of jugs and gunshot wounds in just any old fashion way. (S)Exploitation films have been around since the '70s and for someone not to acknowledge those older manners of approach to such material (that is, not to rehash them over and over again) and try delivering these seedier elements to us with fresh plots or direction or characterization is kind of insulting. Perhaps Uwe doesn't know about these ancestral movies. Or if he has, maybe he thinks he's "updating" them by "integrating" content from the newer media of video games. But neither is an excuse for shoddy filmmaking; in these cases, he's either ignorant or deluded.

Writing: Uwe wrote this in conjunction with his assistant director, which helped in that his assistant director is American but not so much a writer as a hack. Dialog is rarely paced well and while there are some persistent story elements and a few true plot points, it doesn’t sustain anything close to a narrative or even a rebellion against traditional structure: in other words, it just blows.

Direction: Again, the first act shows some limited understanding of space and camera work. Nothing Guillermo del Toro wouldn’t have known when he was 7.

Acting: Feh. We know Uwe couldn't do shit with high caliber actors before Postal…

Editing: Some scenes are fucking ridiculously long and annoying and GRRRR.

Sound: Nothing of note. I guess the gunshots sounded like gunshots.

Soundtrack/Score: There was one song I liked in the first act – so I guess this was better than Speed Racer in at least one regard.

Self-Awareness: Uwe Boll actually has a short role playing himself during the doll extraction scene at the German amusement park. And he manages to poke fun at himself (e.g. he says something like “As you know, I fund my movies with Nazi gold…”), but he’s such a terrible actor that it all falls flat. Nice try.


Overall rating: *

~Ian