Film: Rampage
Release date: 14th February 2011
Certificate: 18
Running time: 85 mins
Director: Uwe Boll
Starring: Brendan Fletcher, Shaun Sipos, Michael Paré, Matt Frewer, Lynda Boyd
Genre: Action/Crime/Drama/Thriller
Studio: High Fliers
Format: DVD
Country: Canada/Germany
This is an English-language release.
For those of a nervous disposition when it comes to screen violence, this film is very likely to make you feel more than a little queasy. The fourteenth of twenty-one Uwe Boll directed works over the past decade or so, Rampage is surprisingly a little more than it appears on the tin; particularly when considering Boll’s somewhat unfortunate cinematic notoriety.
Bill Williamson (Brendan Fletcher) is an angry young man. He appears to be stuck in an aimless and downtrodden existence, working in a poorly paid job whilst living at the mercy of his parents (Matt Frewer and Lynda Boyd) in small town USA.
Bill feels the pressures of modern life in America which continues to creep towards boiling point in his mind. Surrounded by a TV and media backdrop demonstrating the world’s wars and violence, he feel likes a victim at the hands of society at large, where even poor service in a low grade fast food restaurant and the radical views of Evan Drince (Shaun Sipos), who seems to be his only friend, seriously affect him.
When his parents tell him it’s time to move out, and after being poorly treated by his boss at work, Bill decides to take action into his own hands. He believes that his town, and the world as a whole, is an overcrowded place, and he must reduce the population in the most brutal way possible. Thus in his pursuit of vengeance against society, Bill builds up a suit of bullet proof Kevlar armour and goes onto the streets armed to the teeth with sub-machine guns on a devastating killing spree to establish his dominance…
An Uwe Boll film does not create great expectations, since he has gained (and indeed earned) a reputation as a maker of mostly video-game inspired straight-to-DVD schlock. It is indeed a surprise, then, that Rampage is not an adaptation of a video-game with the same title, but an ultra-violent examination of modern societal pressures in the USA in the context of a violence and gun culture.
The film is shot almost in a documentary style, with hand-held cameras and some elements of ‘shaky-cam’ adding a disturbing dimension to proceedings. There is a real sense of dread in the early sections of the film as the pressures of modern living begin to build in Bill’s mind. This is largely down to the unflinching performance of Brendan Fletcher in the central role, who is horrifyingly believable as a 23-year-old man willing and able to commit such shocking acts of brutality.
The pressures of everyday life in small town America are well illustrated by Boll, and a large part of the disturbing nature of the film is that many viewers can empathise with someone who lives such a downtrodden, stuck in a rut existence (which Bill takes to shockingly murderous extremes). For instance, in one scene, reminiscent of an even more unhinged Falling Down, Bill orders a coffee “with extra cream.” His coffee is not served to his liking, and you can tell that in Bill’s mind a mental note of his server has been taken, with terrifying results later on in his killing spree.
The main problem with Rampage, however, and this may seem strange given the film’s title, is the extent of the violence and prolonged destruction on show. When Bill is running around the streets of his town causing general mayhem and chaos (including blowing up the entire police department with the use of a remote bomb), there is a sense that the build up to the events has been downgraded to a typical Uwe Boll nasty.
Indeed, the over-the-top carnage Bill creates in some ways feels like a live action Grand Theft Auto (which may be partly intended). This isn’t as clever as Boll may have intended – instead it comes across as though these events are only happening with a clear design to shock, where they really only offend. In many ways, the relentless television violence that the film is targeting as a trigger for these events is present itself ten-fold in Rampage, where the wanton destruction and levels of implausibility combine and begin to add up. Why aren’t the police better protected in the face of a Kevlar coated madman? Does no-one else in small town America carry a weapon to fire back at Bill? Would a bingo hall full of elderly people and staff really not notice a gun wielding maniac walking in their midst?
Still, Boll does add some stylistic flourishes to the film, which add to the ‘documentary-style’ filming of events and therefore add to the realism of Brendan Fletcher’s central performance. Interspersed periodically throughout the film are small snippets of hand-held camera footage (akin to Bill’s video diary), which highlight Bill’s disturbing motivation for committing such atrocities. It is only at the very end of the film, however, that these videos are somewhat nullified, where the ending itself is more than a little implausible and, at worst, downright ridiculous. Strangely, the film does appear to be left open for sequel opportunities, and it is perhaps surprising given Boll’s prolific output that one has not been made already.
Rampage is a film which starts promisingly with the build up of fear and tension as to what is to come, but the horrifying results of Bill Williamson’s killing spree are not for the faint hearted and seem overly concerned with causing shock. Yet Brendan Fletcher’s central performance is disturbingly realistic in terms of character motivation, where Matt Frewer and Lynda Boyd (as Bill’s parents) ably support as they show genuine concern for the future of their son. DB
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