Killing Season

Saw Killing Season (thanks, Basil!) It was a frustratingly predictable but beautifully shot anti-war film. Set in the wild mountains of somewhere-or-other in America, it stars Robert De Nero as a grizzled veteran of the Bosnian war. He is met by John Travolta, who is playing a Serbian veteran of some kind with tattooed-on hair ala François Sagat. Anyway, the Travolta is clearly back for revenge of some ominous kind and after some cat-n-mouse and some ham-fisted close-ups of knives and so on, the game is on and guns fire and it's a back-wood fight to the death!

The political backdrop of Bosnia is completely obscure to me. I know nothing about the fighting except that it happened and it's therefore refreshing to see something about it. This movie does a poor job of educating you about Bosnia, but then it's not a documentary, so okay. It's main preoccupation, rather, is to comment on the self-fueled nature of war. At one point De Nero gets the better of Travolta but instead of just calling the damn cops, he tries his hand at some amature torture. Travolta escapes as a direct result of this torture, revealing that war continues only because we continue to fight. Of course for this analogy to work we need a national-level, real-world analogue for the police which should have been called. The film's suggestion as to the nature of this cop is perhaps revealed via the repeated images of crosses and mentions of god. I don't know if I really buy this argument (to go full Godwin, were supposed to have surrendered to the Nazis, serene in the knowledge that God would somehow sort it all out? It's an interesting argument (particularly if you're a pacifist) but kind of a tough sell.)

So I don't think I agree with the film's conclusions, but at least it has an argument to make. Unfortunately, the rest of the film fell as flat as its arguments did for me. Travolta in particular was a fairly weak villain. At one point he wheedles De Nero into having a drink and then accuses him of habitually drinking to forget the past. Okay. Later, when the real fighting is happening, he monologues about how he always wondered who would win in a fair fight. De Nero, caught completely by surprize, retorts that this isn't a fair fight. "War is not fair!" Travolta sneers. Such stupidity. Travolta's character I think is supposed to be contrary and hypocritical, but having a straw-man of a villain makes any of the film's philosophical pretensions work even less. Also, the film is fetishistically interested in the iconography of back-woods Real Man. De Nero's factory-built, fiberglass, compound bow snaps in half instantly while Travolta's hand-made bow, which he fashioned under the approving eye of his "fah-der", can shoot through bone. All of this leaves me amused but cold.

So I didn't like it very much. I was glad I able to decypher the symbolic arguments of the plot, but the surrounding tissue is fairly weak. The woods and mountains are beautiful, but then there's Travolta and De Nero with upper and lower sets of teeth showing (respectively) lurching through it all, one being the Devil and the other being America. Well-made indeed, but cheap and silly stuff.