Red White & Blue
Director: Simon Rumley
Writer: Simon Rumley
Cast: Amanda Fuller, Noah Taylor, Marc Senter, Jon Michael Davis, Nick Ashy Holden, Patrick Crovo

Plot:
Erica (Amanda Fuller) sleeps with every man she can, and if its unprotected sex, it’s even better. When she needs a job to be able to keep living at her place, in comes Nate (Noah Taylor) and helps her find one at the hardware store he works at. Erica and Nate tentatively start a friendship, despite the aggression that is just below his surface and her difficulties to let anyone close. But then Erica’s recent past comes to haunt her when Franki (Marc Senter), who slept with her, finds out that he’s HIV positive, setting events into motion that screw all of them.

Red White & Blue is a well-acted film (especially Noah Taylor was outstanding), but it’s not a film that made me care about it. And the soundtrack was horrible.

In 80% of the reviews I read about this film, the complete hopelessness of it was mentioned and how harrowing it was to watch. So it was quite surprising for me that I was mostly bored by the film. All characters behaving like assholes doesn’t automatically translate to hopelessness.

Maybe I would have felt differently about it, if I had more of a connection with any of the characters. But that just never happened. And just when I thought that I might start to care a little more about Erica or Nate, Rumley goes ahead and turns the whole thing into a gory horror movie. [SPOILER] He kills off Erica, therefore removing her from her own story and making it all about the dudes and their struggle with what happens to her instead of making the film about what happened to her and her decisions afterwards directly. [/SPOILER] And that quickly I went from boredom to exasperation.

I like horror movies and I don’t have a problem with them being hopeless (though I’d really argue that this film isn’t hopeless. It just gives you the message that in a world full of psychos, you need to be the biggest psycho to survive). But it just really doesn’t work here. And calling it “Red White & Blue” and having an American flag in every second shot, doesn’t automatically add depth either. It just makes the whole thing feel pretentious.

But at least the cast was really good. Noah Taylor is absolutely underrated. His performance is the backbone of the film. Amanda Fuller also wasn’t bad, as was Marc Senter. But that doesn’t change that overall the film was pretty meh.

Summarising: Oh well.