Tom J. Carlisle
It has some genuinely terrifying moments, it keeps a tight noose around the audience’s collective psyche, and, yes, if you’re looking for it, it takes several Hitchcock films and puts them in a blender. What’s rarely discussed is the comedy.
Perhaps in an effort to be taken more seriously, Goldthwait tries to mix keen observational comedy with heartbreaking family melodrama, which results in a somewhat unholy alchemy.
The wrong people get murdered, the wrong people get fucked, and you are as responsible as anyone. Better to just gouge out your eyes so as to never have to see anything as horrible as the truth again. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.
The Wild Bunch upped the ante so high on what we might call the classical revisionist Western (before knee-jerk irony became de rigueur), that it doesn’t seem possible that anyone could play that particular game anymore.
The contemplation of the lonely life is hardly new in cinema, where it has been the shorthand for psychological depth in every genre from film noir to the romantic comedy to the epic biopic, and certainly not in the novel, where solitary confinement is practically a cottage industry.