Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The Horseman

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they sit down over rump steaks with veggies and discuss it. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing The Horseman, a 2009 Australian revenge movie. The below discussion contains spoilers.

Next Week:  Rock Slyde. Patrick Warburton (David Puddy, The Tick) and Andy Dick (drugs) star in this noir parody.

Spoilers below (even though you already know how it ends)!

Jeremiah: Revenge movies have been quite the rage over the past decade. From Man on Fire to Taken to Harry Brown there is no shortage of movies about a lone man making his way through an organization one step at a time killing a bunch of people to avenge some wrongdoing. The Horseman is somewhat unique in a few ways; the extremely visceral fight scenes, a protagonist who as far as we know has no experience with violence prior to his crusade, the questionable role some of the targets played in his daughter’s death. But for the most part it’s standard stuff. The one aspect that really kept me interested though was Peter Marshall’s performance as the vengeful and totally crazy Christian.

So often in these stories, the main character is depicted as cold, calculating and emotionless, ruthlessly efficient. I think this is typically an attempt to show how much of their humanity has been lost due to whatever injury they’ve suffered. Or a kind of mind game they play with their victims, showing how unfeeling and unyielding they are as means of intimidation. Mostly it just makes them boring.

Christian, on the other hand is wildly emotional and dealing with a seriously fragile psyche. Sure, scenes like the one where he wonders what he’s become while standing in the shower or even cutting himself might be found in other movies. But his violent, rage filled interrogations feel completely fresh. Scenes in which he’s running so hot that one second he can barely form sentences and the next he’s pushing his forehead up against his victim’s in an odd act of intimacy. This blind rage only amplifies our concern that perhaps all the people he’s targeted don't necessarily “deserve” it.

Deep-seated passion like this seems necessary for complete dedication to such a violent venture, and yet it’s far too often left out of revenge narratives. The Horseman may not have much new to add to the genre, but in this regard at the very least its contribution is worthwhile and perhaps even vital.

You don't even want to know where the other ones are.

Ben: Jeremiah pointed out something that I really think deserves to be underlined. This is an entirely different kind of protagonist. There was absolutely no chance that at any point Christian was going to be seen walking away from an explosion in slow motion. The movie followed suit. There wasn’t any attempt to be “cool” per se, and I like that. There was something genuine about our lead, even if I couldn’t quite believe that someone without any special training could be this badass. The fact that his daughter wasn’t any saint made this movie better for me as well. Christian blames these creeps for what happened to her, but he has to feel like he could have done more.

There is an inevitable trade-off though, with the choices that Steven Kastrissios made. For most of the run-time we are treated to the bad guys getting theirs in a most gruesome way. But after five of these scenes or so, I became numb to them. I was still rooting for him to torture these assholes, but it just felt like a little much after a while. That being said, some of these scenes really kick ass.

At first I didn’t think much of the Alice character, it seemed like she was just there to give Christian another young girl to worry about, but there are some pretty good scenes between these two. His explanation to her of what it is like to be a parent would have seemed cheesy in most movies, but here it really hit home. Most revenge movies have really satisfying endings, but perhaps one of the biggest compliments I could give The Horsemen is its conclusion made me feel as empty as revenge is supposed to. His daughter is still dead, and things are no more okay than the first time we saw him. In fact, they’re worse.

What an uplifting way to end a three-day weekend!

Surprisingly, Ben didn't hate the female character.

Jeff: I’m with you guys on the Christian character. He’s a different variety of anguished vigilante. Pair that character with some excruciatingly visceral fight scenes and you’ve got yourself a slightly (only slightly) fresh take on the revenge/exploitation genre. I feel like The IMC is inclined to like these movies, what with all the revenge murders we commit, so The Horseman should be sort of a no-brainer. However, its third act back-tracking cooled me off to a considerable degree, so much so that I’m not sure if I would recommend it.

The early Christian stuff is really top notch. His brutal interrogations take place exclusively in the gray area; we know that the guys he’s torturing are bad guys (at least on some level), but do they really deserve to die? Did their actions lead to his daughter’s death any more than his parenting did? We’re not the only ones asking these questions – Christian is too. Even as he’s shoving an air pump up some guy’s pee-hole, Christian is torturing himself with his own morality. An interesting counterpoint is Terence Stamp’s character from The Limey who undertakes an almost identical journey of revenge as Christian, but seems to have walled himself off from his own feelings of culpability. Christian’s vulnerability really had me invested in a very uncomfortable way.

It’s weird to watch a revenge movie and feel sort of icky cheering for the hero. We’re supposed to take satisfaction from him killing his way up the ladder, but in Christian’s case I was rooting for him to call it quits. There’s a great moment toward the end where he decides not to go after Derek, essentially giving up on his quest, that I thought would’ve been a great place to finish the film. It’d be an original move, denying the audience that final confrontation with the one man who might really bear direct responsibility for the daughter’s death.

But we do get that final conflict. And that’s when, of course, The Horseman goes completely off the rails. There’s a set-up involving a dirty cop, more torture, and a pair of increasingly preposterous escapes by Christian. It also becomes a very black-and-white, good vs. evil struggle – the loving father pitted against the unfeeling super criminal. Here is the larger-than-life plot we’d expect from a Hollywood blockbuster. Basically, it barfs all over the intricate emotions at play in the earlier parts of the film. The Horseman is willing to bend its genre and examine the nature of guilt for only so long. After that point, it’s all about the dramatic brawls in the rain and the sledgehammers to the kneecap.

"Who else fucked her?"

Does The Horseman distinguish itself from other revenge movies with its visceral approach and Peter Marshall's intense performance, or is The IMC just a bunch of repressed anger addicts who will cling to anything that gives them an outlet for their impotent rage? Did director Steven Kastrissios sell out with the action-packed finale? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

Next week: Rock Slyde