Tusk

Kevin Smith – 2014 – USA

I freely admit to not being cool enough for Kevin Smith.  I never have been.  Even back when everyone was gushing over Clerks (1994), I found it snide, affected and generally unpleasant.  I simply don’t see Smith as anywhere near as funny, brilliant or insightful as he sees himself; that’s the problem in a nutshell.  I have a real problem with movies that try to have things two ways; in Smith’s case, his films want to strike some sort of genuine emotional chord with the audience, but they also wink at the viewer to let us know that it’s all a joke.  Smith is afraid to lay it on the line and always pulls away from fully investing into his stories.  We’re supposed to snicker at his self-referential gags and endless indulgent dialogue, and yet somehow then not object when he suddenly expects full buy-in for the sake of an emotional payoff; a buy-in that he does not earn but only demands.  Tusk tells the tale of a snarky podcaster (Justin Long) who is lured into the clutches of a Canadian serial killer who is trying to build a walrus out of a human being, because, eh, who cares?  Motives don’t matter because you’re just supposed to laugh at the outrageousness of it and mock any of your neighbors who may be stuck in their uncool, conventional thinking and feel bad for the victim.  Taking the easy way out whenever possible, Smith is careful to make Long as thoroughly unsympathetic as possible, presumably so you can sit back and enjoy his torture.  Just as with Smith’s Red State (2011), what annoys me about Tusk is its casual and thoughtless sadism.  At what point should this smart and satirical filmmaker get over being satisfied with smoke and mirrors and say what he really wants to say, take some responsibility for what he’s depicting on film, and stop hiding behind the excuse that “it’s only a movie?”  He wants to enjoy sadism and he wants us to enjoy it with him.  The only way to do that is to slickly steer clear of any troublesome details that may actually make us deal with the consequences of violence.  If he’s really that ballsy and bad-ass, let’s see him put an innocent toddler on the torture slab instead of an unsavory adult.  Strangely, the only thing I found worthwhile in Tusk is the same thing I liked about Red State; the psychotic lead performance of veteran weirdo Michael Parks.  Yes, I realize that Smith is an artist and can do whatever he wants.  I’m just saying that he’s kind of a hypocrite too.  He's never grown out of the hot-shot film-student mentality of believing that everything he thinks of is brilliant.  Without that maturity from him, we can get no feeling from his films that he actually cares about anything that's happening in them.  The real bottom line is that none of my quibbles would matter if his films were tremendously great.