Around 6:30 last evening I sat down with Magazine Dreams inside an AMC plex in Stamford. Within 15 minutes I was in a state of twitching animal convulsion.
“Why am I watching this shit?”, I asked myself. “Why am I here? Why in the world would I want to hang with a body-builder as deeply fucked up and rage-consumed as Jonathan Majors’ Killian Maddox, who is ten times more deranged than Travis Bickle?”
I was in that completely empty theatre because some deeply perverse and twisted voices in the HE commentariat insisted that I had to man up and watch this fucking thing…that I would have no street cred if I ducked it.
Well, this is a film that has been carefully calculated to alienate and offend. I’m not surprised to have heard that director-writer Elijah Bynum has been arrested, tried and sentenced to Movie Jail, an actual brick-and-mortar facility located near Bakersfield. Ten years of wearing stripes and breaking rocks in the prison quarry.
Just as it defied credibility that Cybill Shepherd‘s Betsy, a seemingly mature campaign staffer, would go out with the obviously immature and eccentric Travis Bickle in Martin Scorcese‘s Taxi Driver (’76), it makes no sense at all that Haley Bennett‘s Jessie would go on a dinner date with the obviously antsy, deeply insecure Killian. And what a disaster that turns out to be.
Bennett is very good at conveying profound discomfort during that scene.
When Killian does some body-flexing online, some commenters (dudes who immediately reminded me of the HE pisshounds) post demeaning insults…“Incel vibes!…why hasn’t he killed himself yet?” and so on.
Killian is completely untethered to any concept or imitation of emotional health. He’s a time bomb, a lunatic…run in the opposite direction. One way or another he’s going to wind up dead or in jail…something tragic or destructive.
“This film is torture to sit through,” I wrote while sitting in row seven. “I’m miserable.”
That said, Magazine Dreams has four excellent scenes — (a) one in which four white guys, allied with the owner of a paint store that Killian has destroyed, pull Killian out of his car and beat him up badly as one of them calls him an “ape”, (b) a second-act scene in which the principal attacker (the “ape” guy) enters a diner with his wife and two kids, and Killian saunters over and starts verbally intimidating the man and scaring the shit out of the wife and kids, (c) a scene in which he enters a hotel room with a prostitute and then wimps out, changes his mind, and (d) a third-act scene in which Killian, armed with a rifle, slips into the apartment of a guy who gave Killian low marks in a bodybuilding competition, and orders him to disrobe while threatening him with death,
Welcome to the world of a truly ridiculous rage monster. Steroid madness. Boiling blood, smeared blood.
“Body builder collapses on-stage”…who gives a shit?
On top of which Killian fucking eats too damn much. Decidedly gross.
I’ll at least give Bynum and Majors credit for having the balls to make a film that almost everyone who sees it is certain to dislike or more likely hate.
