POSTAL
Directed by Uwe Boll
Written by Uwe Boll
and Bryan C. Knight
Starring Zack Ward
Classification: 18A
*
In the gloriously bloody travesty that is Postal, director Uwe Boll tries to shake us into accepting his film as something very shocking. Carcasses litter the streets like cigarette butts; oral sex is dispensed as casually as a handshake; and, oh, the poop jokes. Boll is labouring under the mistaken belief, though, that shock derives from the absence of restraint. In fact, we are shocked when restraint is intelligently negotiated. What Boll gives us, instead, is a boring beating over the head.
At last week's Vancouver premiere, Boll stood before his audience and confessed that "I put all my frustration with myself, George Bush and Osama bin Laden, into this film." And impotent rage, indeed, is the modus operandi of Postal.
Based on the gratuitously violent video game by the same name, Postal tracks the misadventures of Postal Dude (Zack Ward) after the pathetic town of Paradise breaks his spirit and has him reaching for the closest semi-automatic.
His wife, morbidly obese and considerably promiscuous, is cruel toward Postal Dude and so must be punished - death by explosives. Postal Dude's neighbours are the most rank, ill-mannered, trigger-happy folk that can be drawn from America's saddest pack of inbred caricatures - and a bloody end awaits them also. Finally, a band of terrorists led by Osama bin Laden himself, and an American doomsday cult under the leadership of Postal Dude's uncle (Dave Foley), are hell-bent on raining destruction on the entire United States - they, too, will be summarily dispatched.
How these multiple evils collide and fall under the crosshairs of Postal Dude's curiously accurate weaponry is a mystery only Boll's therapist can fully unravel.
It would be naive to ask for intelligent plot progression from a movie in which a cat is used as a gun silencer. Still, we could at least ask for creative jokes. During the random series of brightly lit yet macabre encounters that ostensibly lead toward Postal Dude's attempt to save the world, a Chinese driver is murdered for holding up traffic, a midget is locked in a suitcase and a pair of suicide bombers argue over how many virgins they will be divvied out just before flying into the World Trade Center. These are the jokes.
This reviewer is not easy to offend, but is very easy to bore. And I was bored out of my tree for the majority of Boll's lamely conceived, cliché-ridden debacle.
But perhaps, as Boll so fervently argues when confronted with criticism, we are missing a deeper meaning. First and foremost, Postal is an indulgent fantasy and, thus, can play by fantastic (nay, ridiculous) rules. Every base, murderous instinct that laces the lizard brain of the Everyman is given full expression in the person of Postal Dude, who, goshdarnit, just ain't gonna take it any more. This ground was covered, though, and more intelligently, in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993).
With Postal, Boll has once again delivered an astoundingly poor video-game-to-movie experiment (previous attempts include BloodRayne and Alone in the Dark, which critics blasted). No doubt video games can be adapted into meaningful films - they are major cultural touchstones and works of art that twig something in millions of players - but that crossover will be managed by more thoughtful directors.
Postal opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver today.
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