Year released: 2012
THE CHARGE: I dunno. Is it a crime to be vile? How about icky? Is it a crime to be icky?
THE EVIDENCE: Vile opens with a stark, high-def scene of a man on an operating table, bound and gagged. As the opening credits appear, a great slacker-rock soundtrack in the background provides a nice counterpoint to the visual of this man getting his chest cut open and salt rubbed into the open wound. Meanwhile, liquid drips through tubes in the back of his head, which is collected, centrifuged and infused into pharmaceutical ingredients. Watching this, I sat back with a grin, enjoying the wickedly black comedy that doubled as a scathing indictment of the drug industry.
Then the movie actually starts. The film softens and becomes noticeably grainier, and the drastic shift in quality makes it obvious that the opening scene was tacked on just to add some punch before the story began proper. I hate when movies do that.
Still, the film does link to the opening scene somewhat. Vile introduces us to several people who have been kidnapped and knocked unconscious, waking up in a somewhat run-down house. They have tubes sticking out of their heads leading to vials on the backs of their necks, one empty and one full. A video message tells them they have 22 hours to fill the empty vials with brain chemicals that can only be generated by pain and fear. If they don't, the poison in the full vial will kill them.
As the film goes on, we learn that a pharmaceutical company is, in fact, behind this whole scheme, and that the brain juice is being turned into street drugs. Why they wouldn't take their unconscious kidnapped victims into a more sterile environment to torture them - like, I dunno, in the scene that opened this very movie - isn't explained. I'll just presume that pharmaceutical CEOs need a little entertainment once in a while, and professional wrestling wasn't on TV that night.
Rock Paper Scissors sucks when no one ever changes their pick.
Anyway, our multi-cultural gang of idiots soon realize that they'll have to torture each other to meet their brain juice quotas, and that process takes up the bulk of the movie's remaining time. The torture methods are refreshingly low-tech; there are no Saw-like contraptions here. Just pliers ripping off fingernails, steam irons to torsos, arms dipped in boiling water and plenty of good old-fashioned punches to the face. It's like Fight Club meets Home Improvement, which makes me think the latter would have been much more awesome if Tim Allen took an occasional crowbar to the jaw.
Only about half of the violence is shown on-screen. The rest of the time is spent on the reactions of the characters to the violence, and if you're going for emotional impact, that's what's more important. In fact, Vile definitely gets one thing right: emotional honesty. The characters actually act the way you would imagine people acting in this situation. Some try to think things out, some immediately freak out, some become resigned to their fate, some put on a brave act only to fall apart when it's their turn to be tortured. Yep, despite the ludicrous story, Vile actually made me care about its characters by having them act like people rather than sheep waiting to be slaughtered. Kudos to the actors, especially April Matson as the pregnant Tayler and Maya Hazen as the bitchy Tara, for pulling this off.
Well... kudos to most of the actors. If you can't figure out within 10 seconds of his/her on-screen appearance which character is actually a mole for the drug company, then go back to Dora the Explorer reruns. "Swiper, no swiping!"
If your mouth was 12 inches wide, it would be a foot! HA HA HA! Kill me now.
Everything culminates in a downbeat finale that doesn't really resolve a heck of a lot while ripping off the ending of the now-classic Hostel juuussst enough that they hoped no one would notice. (I did.) But by that time, the good performances and capable direction by Taylor Sheridan earned enough good will that I was able to roll with it. Ultimately, Vile makes for a good rental that just might have you talking about it for a while afterward.
THE VERDICT: While Vile makes no secret of copycatting several popular genre flick, the court finds it NOT GUILTY due to the general competence involved. It's an example of the very rare occasion when the Rollex watch bought on a street corner works almost as well as the original.
