ASSASSINATION NATION REVIEWED
“Assassination Nation” works off the premise that if privacy evaporates, everyone will kill each other. Honestly, I believe it. I don’t know where we jumped from tangential reality to something that could happen in 2019. When the film opens, it comes with a series of trigger warnings meant to be jokey. From there, it descends into a rapid-fire look at the degradation of social discourse. Everyone walks on edge around each other, while living the lives they want behind closed doors.
Satire is lost on modern America. You can’t poke fun of anything when defenses are up and everyone is looking for a crusade. What happens in Assassination Nation is satire on one level, but it’s also speculative horror. If you put pressure on the shaky structure of proper society, when does it collapse? Well, we know the answer to that. Society collapses when it has to face its errors and can’t reconcile them.
Odessa Young, left, Hari Nef, Suki Waterhouse and Abra in “Assassination Nation.”
Beyond that, Assassination Nation is a female power revenge fantasy about getting back at the men and women who wrong you. Many will eat up the message of its second hour, while others will just ignore the film. I appreciate the four leads and would like to see them in more films. My big takeaway from the film is that I see a lot of ideas that get half-developed and then abandoned. Right when we’re buying into the idea of an information apocalypse, it becomes a gender studies action movie.
Many reviews will argue about its attack on misogyny. Honestly, the film ebbs and flows with greatness before turning into a rather trite lecture. There is about 40-50% of a great movie here and the rest is a numbered post lecture on Twitter. If that’s your thing, go see it.
FILM STATS
- 1 hr and 50 mins
- R
- NEON