Assassination Nation (2018) [Blu-ray]
Comedy | Crime | Drama | Thriller

Tagline: You asked for it, America.

High school senior Lily and her group of friends live in a haze of texts, posts, selfies and chats just like the rest of the world. So, when an anonymous hacker starts posting details from the private lives of everyone in their small town, the result is absolute madness leaving Lily and her friends questioning whether they'll live through the night.

Storyline: After a malicious data hack exposes the secrets of the perpetually American town of Salem, chaos decends and four girls must fight to survive, while coping with the hack themselves.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, December 18, 2018 Writer/Director Sam Levinson's (Another Happy Day) Assassination Nation is a sometimes sobering, occasionally humorous, frequently dark, and extremely violent cautionary tale and deconstruction of the marriage of the modern digital playpen and contemporary humanity. The film plays around with a grotesquely extreme example of what could very well transpire in the real world when a small town is rocked by digital scandal, when people take extreme measures in response to leaked images of sex and sordid revelations that only the phone knows until someone hacks away at the digital ones and zeroes. Then, people begin to hack away at the flesh and blood behind them, because it's all fun and games and the joke of the day until it's their images that are exposed to the world. The film is nonsensical, hyperkinetic, tonally uneven, laborious in its open, fascinating in its middle, and mindless at its end. Yet it's one of those "train wreck" movies from which one cannot look away for its depiction of vapid 21st century life and macabre view of modern society.

Four friends -- Lily (Odessa Young), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Bex (Hari Nef), and Em (Abra) -- are typical modern high school girls, sexting, having sex, and living their lives predominantly through their phones. Their small community -- Salem, Massachusetts -- is rocked when the mayor's phone is hacked and his private life, including a number of sordid photographs, appear online and go viral. He is not the only victim to be humiliated. The high school principal's secret digital life and private conversations are revealed to the world as well. While the local youth thrive on poking fun at and discussing the revelations, many adults are disgusted with the town and school leadership. A rift begins to form which grows exponentially when an unidentified hacker leaks half the town's secret, sordid details. Blame eventually falls on the girls -- Lily in particular -- and they find themselves in a bloody confrontation with bloodthirsty townsfolk.

Assassination Nation has been built from borrowed bits and pieces of every edgy, angsty, ultra violent, and hyper real movie of the last twenty years and attempts to somehow mold them all into a unique identity. The film largely fails, thanks in large part to those readily identifiable components that cannot merge together, yielding a tonally uneven structure that sees the movie transition from one permutation to another without much sense of flow or cohesion. Film's start offers a grating, even disheartening, portrait of modern teenage life which becomes an examination of a small community rocked by digital sex scandal which evolves into an exploration of pain and shame and regret which eventually morphs into madness, as blood is spilled liberally and unapologetically because...who knows why, really why, anyway. A digital Lynch mob looking to protect its own secrets becomes a physical Lynch mob in a climax that resembles something out of a Purge movie. The film is at its best in its middle stretch, but the bookends are largely terrible, the beginning side an irritating, annoying peek into modern culture and the finale a senseless string of brutally violent images.

Levinson clearly has a point, or points, to make in the movie, but what he wants to say is never entirely clear. The film is certainly a commentary on contemporary culture, on vanishing privacy (a fact the girls in the film admit they readily accept, for the most part, which goes against the older generations who are fighting to maintain it). The middle stretch offers particularly interesting opportunities to find cultural critiques, when the lynch mobs form in the digital and real realms alike, when data dumps ruin lives, when real flesh and blood hurts with each post, text, and tweet. It explores the extremes of the interconnection between the real and digital worlds, how today's secrets are no longer secret but merely data files waiting to be exposed. How all of this affects the girls beyond the ultimate push to violence is the most engaging component in the film: how their social lives, their friendships, their thought processes, their approach to the interconnected world and the consequences of what they have done and particularly what they choose to hold as a digital keepsake are concepts that Levinson introduces but doesn't always explore to fruition. He's more concerned with building towards the violence rather than delving into the more rewarding concepts that the film introduces and dances around, kicking the proverbial tires on but refusing to open in any meaningful way.

Assassination Nation is a film bustling with potential, but it's largely unrealized. It introduces a number of good ideas on modern society, digital interactions, and privacy but seems more concerned with graphically revealing the life and times of modern high schoolers and climaxing with excess violence. The movie is little more than bloody fantasy with a middle that asks more questions than it chooses to answer. Audiences that can wait out the grinding first act will be rewarded with a layered unravelling of the digital and real worlds that ultimately leads towards empty splatter. Universal's Blu-ray delivers good video, excellent audio, and has a few extras on hand. For fans only.

[CSW] -1.4- A teenage angst movie coupled to of the modern age by the potential loss of all privacy and the overreaction of that loss. It is a fair satirical fantasy of what that loss of privacy could mean under the worst circumstances. However, most teenage angst turns out to be just teenage angst that tends to disappear in young adulthood. I am too far away from my teen years and not having any social media accounts I would be forced to take this satire at face value if I could just take it seriously. I enjoyed the empty splatter that ensued but that alone doesn't make a movie for me. This attempt at a satirical fantasy just didn't ring my bell.
[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box



º º