i'm sure my thoughts on this won't be original in the slightest but, obviously, it's awful. what surprised me most was that the sickening brand of approved-nostalgia pandering is very far from the worst part. the film designates this 80s pop culture fanboyism as the be-all-and-end-all of fantasy, art, thinking outside the real at all, and then concludes that the way to fix the world's problems is just a slight dose of good old liberal "realism". that is to say,…

-the main villain in this movie is a bizarre strawman of anti-imperialism. i don't think it can be overstated that there's a movie called "black panther" with a hero called "black panther" where the villain is a warped scared liberal view of the actual real black panthers

-the cia is the good guy in a movie marketed as black empowerment

-the character most heavily coded as african-american is constantly referred to as other, outside the acceptable, etc

-it's a small…

comparisons to taxi driver seem lazy to me, since this film isn't really about vigilantism or the morally grey/antiheroism - it isn't even concerned with trying to question the good/bad paradigm, since throughout it's made clear that evil exists. this is a film about how cinema goes about representing that evil, or even if it's possible at all.

the violence committed by joe is shown expressionistically, as it goes from sparse cutaway smash cuts to, by the end, being omitted…