Get it? The number 2 works like the word "to" ... clever huh?

A great deal of dancing takes place in Step Up 2 the Streets, and for that I’ll admit I’m ill equipped to review it in a way that will do its bird-brained plot justice. It’s not just me, though — movie critics are never in the target demographic on these kinds of pictures.

So who is? Pretty much anyone who will openly admit they enjoyed the original Step Up. Or people who use “dope” as an adjective, or “battle” as a verb but have never served in the military.

So, yeah, Step Up 2 the Streets is about dancing. Lots of dancing. It takes place in a world where dancing is the currency, the wallets and purses, the bank and the Federal Reserve. It is also everything else, too — prick someone’s finger and little dancing feet will spill from the wound. Dancing is mostly expression, though, which makes me question that whole First Amendment thing.

This isn’t metaphorical expression. It’s no West Side Story, where dance was a violent catharsis. It’s no Footloose, where dance was a rite of passage. Or Chicago, with its choreographed sins and gyrating thighs. Step Up is more of an exhibition of dance, a technical ecstasy of fancy footwork.

Dancers seem to defy gravity, grow third arms and fourth legs, spin up and in when gravity suggests down and out. Several times characters are seen sliding on their heads across floors; either the floors were just waxed or their domes naturally exude Astroglide. The choreography seems all over the place and is never fluid enough to be considered one constant piece of dance, but the individual moves are exhilarating. It may fail at everything that makes a movie a movie, and a dance a dance, but at least it knows how to show off.

We begin with Andie (Briana Evigan), a girl with far too many half shirts that expose her tummy. Her age is a mystery: she’s in high school (maybe) and lives at home, but then she gets into after-hour dance clubs with relative ease. Andie is with the 410 ("four-one-oh"), a crew of urban terrorists who dance in public on the subway, sometimes to the absolute horror of the elderly. Andie is given one of those cliché ultimatums from an uncaring guardian: “shape up or ship out” … to Texas. She shapes up by wowing some choreography judges with her urban-infused dance moves and gets into a performing arts school that has the potential to “unseat Juilliard.”

Of course, the snobby campus and its required homework alienate her from her friends in the 410, who are so "street" they rehearse in the sweltering sun in rusty playgrounds. They take her tardiness at dance rehearsals as personal attacks on their moral characters, or they're just possessive little bitches. After a formal inquisition and a vote using parliamentary procedure ("You out, let's bounce") Andie is kicked from the group named after Baltimore's area code. She then quickly organizes her own crew out of her school’s eccentric and misfit dancers, who must then battle on the “streets” to prove their worth.

I put streets in quotes only because the movie spends a great deal of time explaining the concept of the streets. It suggests that “the streets” is a metaphor for the real world, where true dancers go to hone and test their skills, which is why kids from the streets dislike trained students — they didn’t earn it. The movie uses the phrase so often, and in so many random situations, that I kept wondering if one of the clubs was actually called The Streets (it wasn’t). So yes, Step Up mistakes the streets as a real place when it’s actually an abstract idea that isn’t really tangible. It's like when people say that they're "in the zone" — there's no real zone.

There are other subplots, of course: a talented male dancer is involved, as well as a nerdy boy with untapped dancing skills, a classically trained ballerina who longs for attention and a bitter dance professor, who thinks hip-hop dancing is classless dreck. I like that guy.

The story is by no means original. It borrows a great deal from cheerleader movie Bring It On, now imprisoned in a straight-to-DVD-sequel hell, as well as 8 Mile, which is a million times more legit and possibly to blame for these hip-hop-based battle movies. (Do yourself a favor and please check out Rize, David LaChappelle’s documentary about hip-hop dancing. It shows the real streets and the real dancers and doesn't tie some stupid love story around them.)

Step Up’s main fault may not be its bogus plot but that it takes itself so seriously. I found myself laughing out loud at many of the developments: the subway boogie, a salsa party, a dance-off in thick sheets of rain. During one rather ridiculously choreographed sequence, panels are removed from the dance floor to reveal buried trampolines, which the dancers then bounce off of in acrobatic glee. When the trampolines were uncovered I immediately thought of Shoot'em Up, which was so bored with normal gunfights it staged one in the air in a freefall.

Hip-Hop culture deserves better than this; maybe it deserves nothing at all — no movies, TV shows, dance-offs — to preserve its authenticity. It’s been said that when the mainstream public discovers something new and interesting then it’s already dead and buried within the circles that were instrumental in its creation. If that’s true then somewhere a b-boy is weeping because of movies such as Step Up 2 the Streets.

February's last glimmer of hope

February could fall into a black hole on the outer rings of the Crab Nebula and no one would notice until pumpkin carving began in October. Maybe this is why the month has the fewest days in it: we wouldn’t miss them if they were suddenly crushed into subatomic particles by extreme gravitational forces.

There are many reasons to dislike February — depress-o-rama Valentine’s Day, Leap Year and that oddball 29th day, the anniversary of the formation of the Nazi Party (1920) — but I’m just talking movies here. February is a garbage month for going to the movies. Ponder the rest of the year: summers are for blockbusters, which means May to August is a gridlock of comic-book movies; winters are for more thoughtful blockbusters (maybe a Harry Potter even) and Oscar-worthy dramas, which takes care of September through December; and January usually has some decent holdouts from the previous year. April’s off the hook because sometimes the summer season starts early.

February and March fall into that dark period that no one wants to admit even exists. The studios know this and usually dump their rubbish into those months, particularly February, in hopes they’ll be forgotten completely or get a minuscule audience for the simple fact that there are no other choices at the box office window.

So far in 2008 the studios have made it very painful: Fool’s Gold, The Eye, 27 Dresses, Over Her Dead Body, Untraceable (technically this counts as a January release) … with each new release the quality goes down, down, down. At this point even I’m getting tired of writing bad reviews, as are my readers. Friday I was at the bank depositing my weekly haul — I’m paid in popcorn seed — when a man approached me to say he enjoyed my reviews but that sometimes I take it a little far with the bashings in my negative reviews. I sympathized with him. It’s not like I want to be so ornery; I’m just forced to by the movies from this particular time of year. So far I’ve ripped everything I’ve seen. The only way a moviegoer — me included — can enjoy this month is to lower their standards, which isn’t fair to the non-February movies, or just stay home.

But wait. This column is not about despair, but hope. The hope is called Be Kind Rewind and it might be the only bright light inside this all-consuming, light-sucking vortex we call February.

It stars Jack Black and Mos Def, two resourceful friends who accidentally demagnetize all the VHS tapes at a rental store. Rather than just buy new ones at great expense, they just re-film cruddy versions of the movies themselves with a video camera and F-grade visual effects. They call the process sweding and in the movie they swede new versions of Ghostbusters, Men in Black, Robocop, Driving Miss Daisy, Rush Hour and The Lion King.

The sweding effect has already produced a cultural phenomenon: sweded versions of movies (including a version of Be Kind Rewind’s trailer, by the director no less) are on YouTube, entire sweded Web pages are popping up on the Internet and my own Volume page is sweded for your enjoyment. The idea resembles, in a not-too-distant way, the plays of Max Fischer from Rushmore. Max took classics like Serpico and Apocalypse Now and retold them using grade-school special effects and child actors. The effect was brilliant. Be Kind Rewind is Rushmore’s logical successor.

As it is right now, Be Kind Rewind could be the first brilliant picture of 2008. Even if it tanks big time — high unlikely, by the way — it should definitely get us through the rest of February and into March, which is probably another sad story all over again.

So, if you’re as frustrated with the movies as I am, just count the days (12 from today) until Be Kind Rewind opens on Feb. 22. Or just turn your calendar to April and just make believe there is something decent opening this Friday.

Five Reasons to Eagerly Await Be Kind Rewind
1. Jack Black — He’s had his genius moments (High Fidelity) and he’s had his flops (Envy), but Jack Black usually excels when the plot goes kablooey. Nacho Libre … horrible film, great Jack Black. Be Kind Rewind features a whacked-out plot so Black should feel right at home.

2. Michel Gondry — He made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Nuff said.

3. Mocks Hollywood — Some of the mocking might be affectionate ribbing, but most of Rewind looks to be a sucker punch to Hollywood’s over-inflated need for special effects, celebrity talent and swollen budgets.

4. The sweded version of Boyz N the Hood — By the looks of the trailers, Black and Def play most of the characters. And is that Black as Doughboy?!? I hope so. These sweded movies better be on the Rewind DVD when it comes out later this year.

5. Mos Def — His hip-hop albums are classics, but slowly and ever so surely this actor is making great movies. Here he plays a solid wall for Jack Black to bounce himself from.

Hollywood close to perfecting the western

Westerns are so rarely action vehicles anymore. Yes, they have action in them, but so more often nowadays they have deeper motives that can’t be cheapened or invalidated with extraneous gunplay.

Modern westerns are metaphorical journeys, or simply a scorched landscape by which these journeys can sprawl. Recall Unforgiven or The Wild Bunch, westerns that seemed self-aware of their time and place in their setting’s histories. The characters aren’t so much playing for a plot, but reacting to the time in which they live and how it has changed their perception of violence and decency. Last year’s 3:10 to Yuma drew on similar principles. Then there’s Open Range, Kevin Costner’s realist cowboy movie that focused not on the bloody gunfight but the drama that frames it like rustic punctuation. Consider also one of my favorite movies of 2006, The Proposition, which allowed us to acknowledge the painful betrayal of two brothers in a land without rules or laws — only a strict, and often amoral, code of conduct existed. Sergio Leone made his westerns into great operas of our time, framing his leads into claustrophobic close-ups amid the howls and hauntings of Ennio Morricone’s scores.

Someday soon the genre will again be cheapened back into action nonsense — Die Hard in the desert — but until then please consider these films as masterpieces of the genre, the oldest genre in cinematic history.

Falling into this topic — classy and unforgettable westerns — is a film released early last year to a quiet applause and poor box office receipts. By and large it was neglected, but after viewing it on DVD this past week it reminds me why westerns are so important. The film, Seraphim Falls, is an explosive adventure through the Old West. Although not quite El Topo or anything else by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Seraphim Falls is a surreal and nearly abstract journey across several frontiers. The people we meet along the way exist partly in reality and partly in a dream, and sometimes we’re not so sure of either. At one point a character seems to not exist at all, yet she offers the necessary tools to move the characters forward … and they accept.

The movie stars Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson. They have names, but I’m tempted not to print them only because they’re barely ever said. In fact, very little at all is said by Brosnan, and Neeson repeats the same line several times — “You will not be paid if he is dead.” Neeson is the hunter; Brosnan the hunted. The movie begins with Brosnan setting up camp in the high woods amid a blanket of snow. A shot rings out and the chase is on. The hunter has four others with him; the hunted is alone. Remember the Super Posse from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? That’s pretty much all of Seraphim Falls: it is a cat-and-mouse chase that lasts the entire film. The chase begins so abruptly that its sudden movement is jolting. Nothing is explained to mark the beginning and nothing is said to mark its end. The film simply comes and goes; beginning in emptiness and ending in emptiness — a most efficient picture.

As Brosnan, caked in mud throughout, runs down snow-covered mountains, across vast plains, through steaming deserts and amid settlements of various kinds, he is relentlessly inventive: he carves out traps for those who prey on him, steals horses, pays off Indians and summarily ends the lives of those who threaten his path. He is often without a horse and gun, but several times he finds ways to reacquire them. Neeson is not required to be as resourceful, but he knows how to track, which allows him to cross entire landscapes following an exact trail of bent grass or brushed dirt. He lunges forward with a momentum that suggests this chase is his personal vendetta. Eventually, flashbacks reveal the reason for the chase and its violent push forward.

Seraphim is a chase, yet it finds time to stop and offer strange encounters: A terse father and his two children, a wanted man with a temper, a congregation of Christians in need of food and water, an Indian with wise prose who controls a tiny puddle of water and a gang of railroad workers who don’t take kindly to horse thieves. One of the more controversial characters is that of a woman in a tiny cart who sells a cure-all elixir. She provides the two men with a bullet each as the gap between them shrinks. As she rides away her wagon says her name is Louise C. Fair. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to read “Lucifer.”

The casting is fantastic. The elixir woman is played fiendishly by Anjelica Huston. Other characters are played by the great creepo Tom Noonan (Manhunter), impish Kevin J. O’Conner (There Will Be Blood) and Native American actor Wes Studi (Last of the Mohicans). Michael Wincott (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), whose geologically painted voice radiates with each word, plays one of the posse. And Brosnan and Neeson are exceptional as well. Brosnan, still fresh out of a Bond franchise, is very convincing with his character’s plight. Much of his dialogue is reduced to shrieks and yells, like when he falls into an icy river or when he strips his clothes in the snow to remove a bullet from a gaping wound in his arm. Neeson holds his secrets close to his chest, but more is revealed as his chase grows more desperate. His flashbacks reveal that his entire family was killed in the confusing days after the Civil War. Anger controls him, yet he does something very curious at the end that seems to change the meaning of what we’ve just seen. It’s not a twist ending, but it comes close.

I should also mention the beautiful cinematography by gifted cameraman John Toll, who succeeds at not only capturing magnificent shots of snowy mountains, forests and deserts, but manages to fit them all into one film with a seamless energy. I can't think of a better movie in recent memory that was filmed in real snow and on a real mountain.

Seraphim Falls occasionally guides its plot by the hand with too much force — a bullet conundrum is solved too quickly, a horse thief is discovered with no evidence against him, a henchman is knocked unconscious too easily — but because some of the scenes are surreal and almost allegorical we can suspend disbelief for the film’s target effect.

This is by no means a perfect western — some would argue it’s not a western at all except for the horses — but Seraphim Falls is a wonderful film, one that adds another element to a genre that hasn’t made a misstep in a very long time. Let’s hope it doesn’t stumble anytime soon.

Rambo spoofs itself ... almost

The new Rambo movie has existed for 15 years. Back in 1993 it was called Hot Shots! Part Deux.

Think I'm kidding? Compare the two: Rambo actually has Rambo in it, Hot Shots has Charlie Sheen as a Rambo parody, both feature technically challenging archery shots, both have long passages on a river in sampans and fishing boats, both have comically cheesy dialogue, both are armed with large-caliber machine guns with limitless ammo, and both tout their body count proudly. At one point in Hots Shots!, Sheen, clad in the trademark Rambo tank top and red headband, assaults militant patrols in the jungle. Wave after wave of soldiers descend on Sheen's Topper Harley and he repels them with what appears to be an M-60. As soldiers fall, a counter racks up the dead and at one point proclaims itself as the "BLOODIEST MOVIE EVER." Not only does this scene directly foreshadow the new Rambo by more than a decade, it basically gives Sly the blueprints for his own scene, which is so similar I question who was spoofing who.

And a side note on the Hot Shots! series: I miss'em. Spoofs just aren't the same anymore. Too many of them are filled with blatant celebrity parody — Britney Spears getting kicked into a pit with her baby as if in 300 … hahaha! Epic Movie, Date Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Scary Movie … none of them are any good and with each successive picture more distance is put between us and the glory years with Charlie Sheen and Leslie Nielsen. Their movies spoofed ideas and specific movements of film, not just the films themselves. The first Hot Shots! managed to make fun of Tom Cruise because it was a successful Top Gun parody. Modern spoof invention would rely on a Tom Cruise lookalike jumping around on a couch and pushing Scientology while holding hands with men. That may be the way the public recognizes Tom Cruise, but the spoofs of days gone by found material from the films themselves and not the gossip rags at the supermarket.

Still hope for February

Fool’s Gold is one of the most preposterous movies that will be released this year. The fact that it stars two respectable stars, Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, only hurts it at this point.

This is the second romantic comedy to star the two sex symbols — the first was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days — and still they have no chemistry. Strangers on the street meeting for the first time have more of a love connection. They begin the movie married and the first frame they share together is at their divorce hearing. Turns out they wed because the sex was great; the judge hears this and rolls his eyes, as do we. By the end of Fool’s Gold they’re getting back together for even worse reasons.

He is Finn, a treasure detective who chases clues to sunken ships and buried treasures. So far he’s found nothing … ever. As best we can discern, he’s never even located his car keys or that remote control that’s squished between the cushions. She is Tess, who serves fancy meals on high-end yachts while her idiot husband (her words, not mine) stomps around the Caribbean digging empty pits. Every now and again Tess winks and grins and suggests her bird-brained husband is worth it because he’s dynamite in the bedroom. This is meant as a joke, but it cheapens the character and Hudson’s overall cutesiness.

Amid the divorce, Finn manages to sink his treasure-hunting boat and fall into debt with the boat’s owner, a rapper/crime lord named Bigg Bunny, one of many underdeveloped villains. The way the boat goes under is the film’s only scene worth writing about in a positive tone: Finn and his partner are underwater on a reef vacuuming sand when a fire on the boat above them ignites the entire hull. The ship descends Titanic-style while their backs are turned.

As the boat crashes into the reef it spits out a broken shard of plate, a major clue to a Spanish treasure called the Queen’s Dowry. The plate lights a fire under Finn who eventually joins up with his ex-wife to seek out the 300-year-old chests of gold and emeralds. Why she agrees to come along, especially considering that she wanted the divorce, is puzzling. But alas, the characters are written so poorly that the only motivation they’re given, if any at all, is sex and money.

Much of Fool’s Gold is clue extrication: Finn finds a piece of the puzzle and then he races across an island to find a new one. He goes from the reef to a lagoon to a Spanish church to a blowhole in the rocks. Some of his treasure hunt is spent under the ocean holding his breath for long periods of time. (Here’s a game: hold your breath when Finn does and see how realistic the underwater scenes are.) Always in tow is Tess, who spends much of the movie posing blatantly in bikinis so teeny-weeny they barely cover Hudson, a very teeny-weeny girl.

Fool’s Gold is directed by Andy Tennant, who gave us Hitch, which I enjoyed for its lighthearted charm, and Anna and the King, one of the better photographed movies of the last 10 years. Here he seems completely incoherent, and he stumbles under the weight of the film’s overall badness. One problem, is that there are just too many characters, many I haven’t even mentioned yet: a rich tycoon (Donald Sutherland) with a rich-man accent who agrees to fund the treasure hunt; his spoiled daughter (Alexis Dziena, Broken Flowers), who is probably a Paris Hilton parody; a Ukranian assistant with an apparent speech impediment; and Finn’s teacher (the great Ray Winstone), who could be a bad guy but is written into nothing, a nobody who turns up to send the plot scurrying in a different direction.

All of this is going on amid dialogue and acting so bogus they should be harpooned and hung from the dock. Another candidate for that treatment is George Fenton, who wrote the score as if the film were a silent feature — music cues jokes, kisses, discoveries … everything that our peepers see is prompted by a symphony of unnecessary sound.

Fool’s Gold is a vapid and lifeless adventure movie. Instead of dropping $20 on it this weekend, just rent Romancing the Stone and be thankful you’re not fool enough to venture to this stinker.

And some words about the stars
Matty and Katie, what gives on the movie choices? You both had decent break-out roles — in fact, they are still considered classics — but now your entire careers pretty much blow.

Matt, let’s start with you. It all began with Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, where you played pot-head Wooderson, a guy who just couldn’t progress after high school. The character played a pivotal role in the plot and is still quoted today — “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That was 1993. You went from that to a craptastic Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel, John Grisham swill A Time to Kill, homoerotic cowboy flick The Newton Boys, a Truman Show-trumped EdTV, overacted dragon epic Reign of Fire, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, super-flop Sahara, bomb rom-com Failure to Launch and feel-good sports flick We Are Marshall. Amid all this you banged out Contact and Amistad a year apart, and later the rather-ridiculous but still enjoyable U-571 —these represent some of your best work. As for everything else … duds. All of them.

Now for Kate, your career hasn’t been nearly as long, but it began on an even higher note. You played beautiful groupie Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical music movie Almost Famous. To this day that movie — that role specifically, even — rests very high up on several of my great movie lists. You nabbed an Oscar nomination for the role, but you’d never know (or believe) that by examining the movies that came after Almost Famous. Consider the barely distributed Dr. T and the Women, miserable period piece The Four Feathers, the super ludicrous Alex & Emma, absurdist comedy Le Divorce, the big-sister-as-the-new-mom-movie Raising Helen, stinker supernatural thriller (with a killer ending) The Skeleton Key and then You, Me and Dupree, which was kinda funny, but never your part. And now Fool’s Gold, which is somewhat similar to mommy Goldie Hawn’s romantic comedy Overboard. You were on the right track for better projects, but now, because of your willingness to traipse around in skimpy outfits in dull comedies, your entire career as a serious actress seems pretty much derailed.

Matt and Kate, if either of you need a new agent, consider my services now offered.

Violence is the ultimate anti-violence

I’ve heard of cranky old timers, but John Rambo is a tad ridiculous. If he flies off the hook in backwoods Burma over wasted tugboat gasoline, just think of what happens when his Medicare benefits are canceled in Sun City.

Rambo, the fourth film in the decidedly ’80s action franchise, allows Sylvester Stallone a glorious return to a character who binged on violence and carnage in obscene amounts. (Don’t forget, though, only one person died in the terrific, initial Rambo film, First Blood.) Rambo might have even topped himself here with a movie that breaks any measurement scale normally used to gauge violence levels at the multiplex. In terms of blood and guts, dead bodies and corpse counts (236 by the way), decapitations and mutilations, the new Sly flick is almost unclassifiable. Simply put, Rambo might be one of the most violent movies ever created.

In case you’ve yet to witness the film: It opens with news photos of real dead people, then quickly launches into its blood-blown tirade with prisoners stepping on landmines, massacred villages, bayoneted children, gutted missionaries, ragged leg wounds, impalements, disembowelings, decapitations, archery fatalities, gooey head implosions, organ ventilations, exposed intestines, pulverized bone, splintery fragments of femur and pelvis, eviscerated torsos and, in an act of supreme ultra-violence, Sly gets behind a mounted cannon and shreds an entire division of enemy combatants with .50-caliber rounds. When characters are shot, the wounds eject not only blood, but entire chunks of meat and oozing matter. At one point, Rambo detonates a bomb so large it appears to destabilize the Earth from its axis. Few victims are spared, few limbs are left intact and few bullets are left unfired … Rambo goes to great lengths to achieve its bloodied nirvana.

It’s so violent I found myself questioning its purpose: Is this some kind of over-the-top joke? Is it a rite of passage for gorehounds who thought they knew bloody movies? Is it entertainment — the kind left to its own devious devices — that was simply led astray by its envelope-pushing director (Stallone)? Is it Rambo’s testament to his forgotten relevance after missing a decade (the ’90s) of action movies? Is this a catharsis for Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq?

Maybe yes to all of them. Or maybe another idea …

I’ve settled on an alternate theory entirely: Rambo is an anti-violence violence movie. It sounds like a contradiction, but hear me out. First, consider Sly’s own comments just this week on ReelzChannel, an Internet entertainment page, when he said his movie is based on real violence.

Here’s the whole quote: “[We’re] dealing with a real subject. As we are speaking right now, people are dying and being tortured in the most brutal fashion you can imagine, and this film will show that. If we’re going to do anything that actually uses this media, besides entertaining, it’s to perhaps save a few lives and bring awareness to this. Please don’t water it down. Yes, babies are being decimated, women are being raped … all that happens all the time. Just let it flow.”

I don’t buy his reasoning — that filmed violence of this magnitude is needed to shed light on real human killing continents away — mainly because the movie is so unrealistic, and realism is important when delivering a message to the world on behalf of an entire people’s struggle. (In regards to realism, for instance, bodies do not fly back 40 feet after being shot, an action cliché that was debunked on an episode of Mythbusters.) Also, the Burmese people are a footnote to Rambo’s finely honed skill of ending life — just consider the movie’s tagline: “Heroes never die … they just reload.” And as we’ve learned with ultra-violent movies such as Chaos and the Hostel series, simply showing this kind of death in an objective way is not art, but more like cruel voyeurism.

By topping himself and all his counterparts (and his counterparts’ children and grandchildren), 61-year-old Stallone has positioned what may be his last action film as the sacrificial lamb, the movie in which audiences question their thirst for blood. No doubt some people will froth with excitement at the beheadings and killings, and the tendons and muscle tissue that hang from the exploded cross-section of a man’s torso, but in the end Rambo will turn more stomachs — I heard one viewer respond with, “Well, that was traumatizing.” And as other films try to top Rambo, the action-movie system will collapse under the constant one-upping of the violence. The more violent the movies become, the more we will turn away.

After writing all this, I have to admit I enjoyed Rambo. I enjoyed it, though, because it was so beyond anything I’ve ever seen that I couldn’t help but laugh and amuse at its glorification of the almighty bullet. How ironic, I thought, that this movie takes itself seriously. Later, I felt very uneasy about the implications of “the most violent movie of all time.” Where do we stop with violence? How far do we allow it to embed itself in our films before we stop buying into it?

Rambo is the anti-violence violence movie because it draws a line in the sand. Ask yourself what side you’ll be standing on if Rambo is tame compared to the movies of 2009.

Methods of Violence
Movie violence can be warranted and justified. Not always of course, in which case it can be exploitive and unnecessary. Here are some different kinds of cinematic brutality and the movies that subscribe to its methods:

• Historical Violence — Sometimes for us to understand history, we must witness all of its ugliness. Surely this is the case for Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, which allowed us to see the things our history books weren’t always so clear about. Or consider another candidate for world’s most violent movie, The Passion of the Christ, which offered an image of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion that many Christians gloss over.

• Stylish Violence — Some movies embrace violence for an effect, be it a special effect or the overall stylization of a story. Sin City and 300 are hyper-stylized lessons in blood. Kill Bill used violence as a signature for its director, Quentin Tarantino, who had married a genre-bending plot to a salvo of diced limbs. Some movies use gore to reach technical benchmarks: Hard Boiled and Equilibrium were masterpieces of orchestrated gun battles, Dead Alive and The Thing toyed with creepy physical effects, and Planet Terror used oozing sores and mutated soldiers to pay tribute to a forgotten era of zombie slashers.

• Metaphorical Violence — Grisly fatalities and bloody casualties can dictate to audiences the descent of key characters or a whole people in general. Consider The Wild Bunch, with its all-out warfare by film’s close. The bloody sequence serves as a watershed moment for the Old West; it marks the passing of one era and the coming of another one, and it wouldn’t have worked without guns being drawn and lives coming to an end. Reservoir Dogs, another Tarantino movie, uses guns and bullets to show that there is no honor among thieves. Straw Dogs suggests that no violence can be emasculating and that the only way it can be undone is through a bloodletting.

• Exploitive Violence — Through this device, most horror movies spring. Often is the case that movies that employ this device do it for shock value alone, and it usually serves no greater good to the plot, if there is one. Consider Hostel and its sequel, the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, Chaos or any of the films from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. They delight in suffering and cruelty, and they often exist for no other reason other than those.