Sylvain White | Through the Shattered Lens

Slender Man is a 2018 horror film about the Slender Man, the mysterious supernatural being who appears in online photographs and videos and who …. well, I’m not sure what it is that he does exactly. Apparently, he targets children and teenagers and he uses his long arms to either abduct them or drive them crazy or maybe take them to a different realm of existence. Who knows? That’s actually probably a part of the appeal of Slender Man. He can pretty much be whoever or whatever anyone wants him to be.

In this Massachusetts-set film, four teenage girl decided to summon the Slender Man. Their ceremony works but it turns out that summoning a demonic figure who hunts children is not as good an idea as the girls originally assumed. Who would have guessed it, right? After one of the girls disappear, the other three try to figure out how to deal with Slender Man. It all leads to death, insanity. and panic. Yay!

Slender Man is one of those films where nearly every scene is severely underlit and it’s often difficult to actually tell what’s happening in each scene. This has become a very popular technique in recent years, one that some directors have embraced almost to the point of absolute absurdity. (Watch any horror-themed program on Netflix and you’ll see what I’m talking about.) I imagine the idea is to create a creepy and shadowy atmosphere and to keep you wondering about what might be lurking in the darkness. There’s nothing wrong with that, if the film itself is genuinely scary. However, in a film like Slender Man, the underlit look feels rather lazy. It’s as if the director and the cinematographer realized that the film’s story was never going to make sense so they specifically turned off the light to try to keep us from noticing. Instead of trying to improve the script or maybe come up with something interesting for Slender Man to do, they instead did the cinematic equivalent of shoving the audience into a dark room, locking the door, and then shouting boo in the vain hope of tricking them into being scared.

Of course, a huge part of the problem with Slender Man is that real life is often scarier than anything that will ever appear in a movie. In 2014, two teenage girls really did stab one of their friends and they did attempt to blame their crime on Slender Man, whom they claimed they were tying to impress. This led to a moral panic, one in which parents worried that internet memes were turning children into sociopaths. My own personal opinion is that if your child is stabbing one of their friends, they have problems that go far beyond anything they may have seen online. Moral panics are a lot like Slender Man, in that they can be whatever the participants want them to be. In this case, the panic over internet memes allowed parents the luxury of not reflecting on whether or not their own bad parenting has anything to do with the actions of their children. “No,” parents could say, “it wasn’t that we raised a sociopath! It’s that some anonymous user posted a silly picture of Slender Man peaking out from behind a tree!” It is much easier to demand that a website be taken down or censored than to actually ask yourself why your children would be 1) stupid enough to believe in Slender Man in the first place and 2) eager to impress him.

Though Sony Pictures always denied it, it’s obvious that the Slender Man movie was made to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the Slender Man trial. Unfortunately, the film itself just isn’t scary. It’s poorly paced, poorly acted, and way too dark. No wonder Slender Man hasn’t been seen in a while….

Usually, I’m not a big fan of action movies. If you see me in the audience of an action movie, it means that I’m either 1) on a date with a guy who really doesn’t care if I’m bored out of my skull, 2) the movie is actually a film with action as opposed to an action film, or 3) there’s absolutely nothing else playing. It was because of that third reason that yesterday afternoon, I could be found at the Regal Keystone, watching The Losers.

Surprisingly enough, however, I ended up enjoying The Losers.

Why?

Six words: Idris Elba, Jason Patric, and teddy bear.

Idris Elba. Oh God, where to start? I think Idris Elba may be one of the best actors working today. If you’ve seen him in The Wire then you’ve seen him as an intimidator. (And, admit it, The Wire was never as good after Stringer Bell got killed.) If you’ve seen him on The Office than you know that Elba can also be unexpectedly funny. In the Losers, Elba gets to be both scary and funny at the same time. (And incredibly sexy though I doubt that’s going to be a big selling point for this film’s target audience.) Idris Elba manages to look convincing while both blowing things up and, during one of the film’s many postmodern moments, commenting, “Wow, this is sleazy.”

Elba plays Rocque, the second-in-command of a paramilitary group known as the Losers. Much like the A-Team and the Expendables (both of which will be coming along later this year), the Losers are betrayed by their government and wrong declared dead. They — a glowering Elba included — find themselves stranded in Bolivia where they pass the time working in a doll factory, betting on cockfights, and plotting vengeance against Max.

Who is Max? This question is at the center of The Losers and it’s never really answered (perhaps it will be in the sequel). It’s insinuated throughout the film that he’s involved with the CIA, that he’s a terrorist, or that he’s just a patriotic businessman. Of course, the answer is that Max is actually Jason Patric (a.k.a. the son of Father Damien Karras).

I have to admit that, in the past, Patric has never really impressed me much as an actor. In the past, he’s always seemed a bit stiff and humorless. Patric plays Max as a man who is not only a comic book villain but who is totally aware of it as well. You can tell that Max is having a lot of fun being evil and that Patric is having fun playing evil. Patric’s over-the-top but compelling villainy let’s the audience know that this movie has no pretensions beyond entertainment. It makes both Patric and the film enjoyable to watch.

And this leads us to the teddy bear.

At the start of the movie, the Losers are rescuing a bunch of children who are being held hostage by some random bad guy in Bolivia. As they load the thankful children into a waiting helicopter, an angelic little boy attempts to hand over his teddy bear as a thank you gift.

“No,” Col. Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) replies, “you keep it. It will bring you luck.”

The angelic child smiles and clutching his teddy bear, he goes into the helicopter. The helicopter then lifts up into the air and promptly explodes. As the Losers stare at the burning wreckage, the camera zooms in on the only thing that apparently wasn’t incinerated in the explosion.

Yes, it’s the teddy bear.

And as soon as I saw that, I knew that the Losers was going to work. I soon as I saw that teddy bear, I knew that this was a film that felt no shame at being a work of pure pulp fiction. In this age when every studio film is trying to feel independent and when most filmmakers would be too self-consciously hip to actually do something as shameless as show that little bear among the wreckage, the Losers went for it. The Losers said, “We don’t care if it’s an obvious move and thoroughly illogical for a teddy bear to survive — with just a few burns — an explosion that so totally incinerated 25 people that not a single body part is seen among the wreckage. We’re showing the damn bear!”

That’s when the Losers won me over.

A few more random thoughts on The Losers:

1) As Arleigh pointed out in his review, one of the film’s biggest strengths is the chemistry of the Losers themselves. As opposed to most ensemble action films, all of the Losers are given clearly definable personalities, all of them are given something important to do, and most importantly, you believe that these guys would actually choose to hang out together. When one of the Losers is eventually revealed to be a traitor, you feel the entire group’s shock and pain. This adds an extra layer to the film that, for whatever reason, I suspect we won’t be seeing with The A-Team.

2) The Losers is yet another film that demonstrates the importance of not only walking in slow motion but having something to throw to the side while doing so. It just looks incredibly cool on-screen though people tend to get annoyed when you attempt to do the same thing in real life.

3) Throughout the movie, we are continually told that The Losers are waging war on the CIA and the American establishment in general. The audience I was with loved this. Once again, this validates my theory that the best reflection of the times can usually be found in contemporary pulp.

4) Zoe Saldana is in this film too as a mysterious woman who helps the Losers track down Max. In the style of Carrie-Ann Moss and the Girl with the dragon tattoo, she gets a chance to kick a lot of ass and I have to admit that I found this so inspiring that, once I got home, I stripped down to my undies, stood in front of my bedroom mirror, and attempted to execute a few flying kicks of my own. The lesson I learned from this is that I’m not Zoe Saldana. That and, regardless of how soft the carpet is, it still hurts when you end up falling flat on your ass.

In the end, The Loser is the perfect definition of stupid fun. I’ll take stupidly fun over funny stupidity any day.