Briefly.
I saw this with my roommate last night, and I have to admit that I agree with his assessment: it was one of the most violent movies ever put to film. The acting was superb; the casting was practically perfect; the setting was just grim enough to pull it off. In short, it was a near-perfect film—except for that nagging little fact that I now know and cannot forget exactly how it looks when a man gets shot point-blank in the face (or from the side, or from behind, or slightly at one angle and downward…).
This is the first movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t look like the delicate MTV playboy that everyone seemed to love so much in Titanic (though I still wouldn’t know, having never seen it), Matt Damon proves once again how gifted an actor he is, and Jack Nicholson is your typical sleazeball, R. P. McMurphy all over again only without the charm. Mark Wahlberg unexpectedly steals the show.
But the real question is why there’s a trend in American cinema toward violence while sexual intercourse remains (much more) taboo. Everyone from the Euros to the Aussies are laughing at us because we send nearly one million complaints to the FCC because of one flashed boob at the Super Bowl while we think nothing of prime-time stabbings, shootings, gang violence, and so forth. This movie seemed to sum up in caricature that mindset: there was one “suggestive” love scene which was by no means explicit nestled between more than two hours of highly tense scenes involving loss of identity, self-hatred, and militaristic acts of violence. Why is that? Why are we so afraid of sex but seem to have a fascination with violence?
