For the Sake of Vicious

Some things that are great on their own aren't meant to go together. Steak and hot fudge. A nap and a Slayer album. Baseball and thunderstorms. There's a movie in from 1994 called Death And The Maiden. It's about a woman, married to a lawyer in a South American country. Her husband picks up a guy who's stranded on the side of the road, but when he brings the guy home, the woman is convinced he is from the former regime that ruled the country, and the man who imprisoned, tortured, and raped her for weeks. She takes him hostage and forces a mock trial on him to get a confession. There is no evidence to prove his guilt, only her memory and her insistence; there is no evidence to prove his innocence, only his insistence and memory. The movie that unfolds is a contest of wills. And then there's You're Next, a horror-action movie about an extended family beset by a gang of killers during a gathering. One of the women turns out to be far more resourceful, and dispatches the killers and the conspirators in increasingly bloody fashion. Now. Marry these two movies. But make each one only 40 minutes long, and transition between the two of them at a moment's notice. That's the biggest problem with For The Sake Of Vicious: it is two movie concepts that play well on their own, but stapled together, hurt the overall experience. The first 40 is a taut game of mental cat-and-mouse between a father and the man he believes raped his young daughter, and caught in the middle is a woman (who, in a needlessly complex twist, is both the tenant of the accused man, and the nurse who attended to the rape victim). For that 40 minutes, both men stand by their stories, and we have no evidence but their words and their convictions. And it works pretty well. And for the second half of the movie, a business partner of the accused (who has ties to the underworld) decides now is a good time to bump off this guy and sends a gang of bikers to kill him, leading to the three banding together to survive, in a gory home invasion movie. It's high octane, it's visceral, it's intense, it's done with almost no dialogue whatsoever, and it's fun. But at the 40 minute mark, this movie literally stops being one thing and starts being the other, and these two things together make no sense at all. There is no transition in the slightest, and the accused man's connections to a seedier element are barely hinted at, leaving you to make the connections yourself. It's as sudden as flipping on a light in a darkened room, and it is jarring. Imagine if, at the halfway point, Major League only focused on the Tom Berenger/Rene Russo love story, or if Gremlins went hard-R and they started eviscerating everybody in increasingly gory fashion. It makes no sense, thematically, structurally, or tonally, and it causes both halves to suffer because of it. And while that is the only issue I have with this movie, it is a monumental, catastrophic issue. Weave the elements together better, signpost some of the plot elements that are very, VERY understated, and you have a **** movie (with a stupid name), no sweat. The acting is excellent, the effects are top-notch, and the fight choreography is ugly and brutal. But the way this movie is structured leaves me frustrated, like the writer and director had two great ideas they couldn't flesh out, so they just slammed them together and hoped for the best. It didn't work the way they wanted.