Bruiser

On a long enough timeline, every artist has a hot period and a swoon. Directors are not immune from this. Hitchcock's post-Birds career doesn't carry the same import as his mid-50's to mid-60's period. Spielberg's name is still valuable, but he hasn't had that water-cooler movie since Saving Private Ryan. That's not to say these later era movies are bad. Spielberg's Lincoln was very good. Wes Craven gave his career a shot in the arm with Scream. F For Fake was one of Orson Welles' final projects he completed in his lifetime. George Romero's Bruiser is not one of those movies. It is Ready Player One, or Cursed, The Immortal Story. It is a late career movie that, at every step of the way, reminds you that this director has lost what made their best works so great. Bruiser (directed AND written by Romero) is about Henry, an average guy who has dreams but not ambitions, hopes but not goals. His wife despises him for his refusal to stand up for himself and work for what he wants. His buddy takes advantage of him. His boss seduces his wife right in front of him at a party and mocks him in business meetings. He is gifted a plain white plaster cast mask by the estranged wife of his boss to decorate for an art piece at a party. The next morning, he finds that his face has become that mask; plain, featureless, ghostly white, pinhole eyes. His physical identity has become as empty as his internal one. Driven insane by this, he decides to get revenge. If it isn't apparent by reading it, this movie is an intersection of Falling Down and Hollow Man. It's ironic then that this movie's identity is wholly borrowed from other movies, yet retains no identity of its own. The whole idea of literally becoming faceless, of an existential crisis manifesting in a literal loss of identity, has a lot of promise. It could be used to explore modern (for then) society, how the business world sees only those at the top as useful and everyone else is grist for the bone mill, how outward perceptions have been over-valued by society. Romero has a history of using horror for social commentary to great effect. This has none of that whatsoever. The boss' arch, OTT selfishness and cruelty is not explored as a consequence of power; there is no deeper meaning in Henry's wife being resentful and bitter because he wasn't the hungry go-getter she thought he was, or the best friend who secretly steals from him because Henry is too trusting (and anonymous) to notice. These are MENTIONED, but that's where any examination of the themes end, leaving the characters that should be used to explore them as props. Callous cheating wife; liar best friend; overbearing boss. The themes are titles pinned on the lapels of these caricatures and nothing more, so the movie can settle in for a bog-standard revenge plot. But even then, Bruiser can't get it right. Falling Down's story of D-FENS' fighting back against the system made sure to point out that, as much as the system was broken, his actions against it were no better. There may be some cathartic joy in seeing D-FENS stand up for price gouging in the market scene, but we also know he's terrorizing a small business owner that is just as much a cog in the machine as D-FENS is and is just trying to make a living. Bruiser wants the viewer to have sympathy for Henry; he's painted as ignored, downtrodden, taken advantage of. He's not; the disintegration of his marriage did not happen overnight, and he ignored it. He turned over his financial portfolio to his money-hungry, status-chasing, amoral shark of a friend and never once checked the books. I'm not saying he deserves it, but most of the injustices Henry suffers could've been avoided had Henry not stuck his head in the sand. He's not sympathetic, he's just pathetic. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that the crimes committed against him do not rise to the level of lethal retribution. Henry becomes worse than the people who wronged him, but Bruiser wants to portray him as an avenging angel, a wronged man fighting back to find his identity. Divorce and moving to a new city IS an option, Henry. Compounding this terrible plot and confused tone is a script that has some of the most unnatural and outdated dialogue, and most of it is delivered by actors who must've taken a few Ambien before reporting to the shoot. Lead Jason Flemyng is as interested to be there as a store clerk is to be working Black Friday. Leslie Hope (Terri Bauer from the first season of 24) is mostly there to react. Peter Stormare is having a ball, going way, way, way over the top, but he's so animated, he looks like someone dropped Daffy Duck into a psychological drama. This movie even does the impossible and makes Tom Atkins -- TOM MF'ING ATKINS -- dull. That should be impossible, like circling the square or counting to infinity. The movie's basic premise even fails the smell test of logic; Henry's face being wiped clean is supposed to function like an Invisible Man variant, but it doesn't function because of the very nature of it. The Invisible Man works because the man is invisible; his loss of identity is absolute. We can't see him and neither can the other characters. Henry's face disappearing doesn't make him disappear; it makes him stand out. He's the only person whose face is paper white and featureless. Who else is it gonna be? The movie could've balanced this out by giving hints that maybe this was all in Henry's head, some kind of psychological breakdown as he confronts his meaninglessness in the world, but it doesn't. Brusier presents this as a physical transformation. So, paradoxically, the movie's intent of stripping Henry of identity in a physical sense to match his internal lack of identity has the opposite effect of making him singular. His facelessness GIVES him identity. You had one job, Bruiser. I kept waiting for some sign of the visionary director of Dawn Of The Dead and Creepshow to show through. It never did. There is no trace of George Romero to be found in this movie. The lack of identity goes right down to the core with Bruiser. You could've directed it, I could've directed it, it could've arrived complete from an alternate reality. It is a black hole of a movie. It offers nothing, gives nothing, has nothing. I suppose I should applaud it for thematic consistency, but I can't, because I had to sit through the damned thing, hoping in vain that it would pull itself out of the malaise. It never did. I haven't seen every Romero movie yet, but of the ones I've seen, this is easily the low point.