Sundance 2011 Review: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN was completely Badass!
This year at the Sundance Film Festival there has been a decent amount of completely jacked up movies with films such as I Saw the Devil and The Woman. Then there was the highly anticipated Hobo With A Shotgun which ended up delivering a giant dose of “holy shit! they just went there!” This movie crossed the line several times, but it was all done in good over-the-top bloody fun.
I thought the movie was awesomely psycho, and I had an absolute blast watching it. When compared to other modern day grindhouse film like Death Proof, Planet Terror and Machete... Hobo With a Shotgun beats them all. It was an all around better film, that was much more bold, daring, and a lot more fun. So I have to give props to the director of the film Jason Eisner for showing up Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino.
The film follows a Hobo who enters a new city to start a new life for himself as a lawnmower man, but the city he enters is literally hell on Earth, and his plans change. He becomes a vigilante in a corrupt city where the criminals reign supreme. He takes matters into his own hands, grabs a shotgun and starts blowing people away, making the city a better place to live one death at a time. His main goal is obviously to take out the main crime boss and bring back peace and order to the city. Of course the crime boss wants to retaliate and turns the people against the hobos of the city, by threatening the peoples children. Chaos is unleashed, and there are a lot of crazy jaw-dropping surprises around every corner.
The movie was ruthlessly savage, and it didn’t hold back anything. It surprised the hell out of me and the rest of the audience with what they ended up doing in this film. It showed no mercy to anyone. The people in the theater laughed and groaned with delight as we watched as people were being savagely destroyed. There’s even a good amount of kids that meet their maker in the film. I’m pretty sure that there are going to be people out there that are offended by what this movie involves.
I really don’t want to give anything away and spoil the movie for you, I want you to be able to go into watching this film not knowing anything about what you are going to see. The less you know the better the movie going experience will be for you.
Rutger Hauer was fantastic as the shotgun wielding Hobo, and you couldn’t have asked for a better actor to take on this awsome role. He had a ton of great one-liners that had me and the rest of the audience laughing our asses off. This must have been an extremely fun role for him to play.
The film knows what it is, and it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. After all, it’s a movie about a Hobo cleaning the mean streets out with a shotgun and painting the streets red with blood. I definitely recommend you go out and watch this movie once it’s released, because it’s a fun badass movie that most of you are probably going to love.
Heres the synopsis for the movie:
A train rolls into its final stop. From one of the freight cars jumps a weary-eyed transient with dreams of a fresh start in a new town. Instead, he lands smack-dab in the middle of an urban hellhole, a place where the cops are crooked and the underprivileged masses are treated like insignificant animals. This is a city where crime reigns supreme, and the man pulling the strings is known only as "The Drake." Along with his two cold-blooded and sadistic sons, Ivan and Slick, he rules with an iron fist, and nobody dares fuck with The Drake, especially not some hobo.
Director Jason Eisener’s blood-soaked return to the Sundance Film Festival is more than just a nod to the grindhouse flicks of the 1970s and ’80s; he ups the ante in a major way, and Rutger Hauer’s performance is a legendary display of brutal ass-kicking and meticulous name-taking that is not to be missed.