Movie violence

I don’t know if I’ll ever become desensitised to movie violence. Saw a couple of movies recently during which I found myself flinching or averting my eyes a lot.

I had no particular expectations when we went to see Unleashed (which has also been released as Danny the Dog). I did know that Jet Li was in it so I did expect a certain level of ‘action’. Well, there was action in this movie – a lot of it – fast, furious and very violent. Jet Li’s character, Danny, is a human animal, kept by his ‘master’ (played by Bob Hoskins), to unleash on people who refuse his demands for protection money.

I found the story a bit unbelievable. We learn that Danny has been ‘kept’ by the crim for years, and that he has been trained and so brutalised that he becomes a vicious, practically unstoppable fighting machine when he is ‘unleashed’ – his dog collar is taken off his neck. Danny is finally saved by a blind piano tuner (played by Morgan Freeman) and his daughter, who take him in and look after him after he walks away from a car crash. What I want to know is, where are the police in this story? We never see them. Why did no one ever notice the Bob Hoskins character’s mistreatment of Danny? We are shown that Danny was taken in by the crim at a young age (after he kills Danny’s mother) – surely someone would have noticed this young Asian boy suddenly appearing in the entourage of a criminal and questioned what he was doing there?

Much of the movie was a vehicle to show off Jet Li, with many extremely brutal scenes of men getting their heads slammed into concrete and being generally pounded into a pulp. It was such a violent movie that by the end of it I found my neck and shoulders aching from all the flinching and tensing I must have done during the show.

The Korean movie Old Boy was also very violent, but quite different in that it was very dark (Unleashed had that Hollywood-lite feel to it). A man, Oh Dae-su, is abducted and imprisoned for fifteen years, with no contact with the outside world apart from a tv. The tv shows him the news that his wife has been murdered – and he is the chief suspect. He has no idea who his abductor is, or why he is being held, and over the years in his cell he develops an overwhelming desire to seek revenge. When Oh Dae-su is finally released his abductor lets him know that he is being watched, and tells him that he has five days to work out why he was imprisoned. Otherwise, the young chef, Mido, who pities him and takes him into her home will be killed. Oh Dae-su’s quest to find out why, and to get revenge, is a driven, awful journey.

There are several horrific scenes. In the sushi restaurant where he first meets Mido he orders “something live” and when he is presented with a live octopus, proceeds to eat it. Yes, he eats it. You see the poor octopus squirming against his mouth as he swallows it, slowly. Awful but compelling. He manages to find the place where he was imprisoned (after tracking down the restaurant which delivered the fried dumplings which were his daily meal for fifteen years), and using a hammer, pulls out several of the teeth of the guy in charge of the place. He is so driven he beats back a whole gang of thugs despite having a knife in his back. And on and on. When you finally learn the reason for his imprisonment, it is over something that was very trivial at the time it occurred. I won’t give away too much, in case you actually want to see this movie after reading this.

We saw Old Boy on DVD, which meant that I could actually get up and leave occasionally when it got too much.

I sometimes wonder what the point of movies like these are. From the point of view of the producers, I suppose it is to make money. The audience wants to be entertained, I guess. I don’t know if I was particularly entertained by either of these two movies. For me as the viewer, Old Boy was emotionally gruelling, Unleashed physically punishing.

I’ll let Bart Simpson have the final say. Bart (to Lisa): “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it!”

Categories: review, film, violence