Blackout (2007) – DVD Review

Have you ever wondered what Cube would be like in a single room, without any of the better traps or the fancy lighting of the boxy locations? Yeah, me neither, but that’s what you get when you watch Blackout. I swear, while I was watching this flick I kept hoping for it to move away from the ‘Cube on a budget’ thing it had going, and do its own thing. I’m not making this up, from the flashbacks, to the personal breakdowns, to almost copying the ending verbatim; Blackout owes the creator of Cube at least a writing credit.

Rating:

Still want to hear the ‘story’? OK, your choice. Three people (from different walks of life) are trapped on an elevator on a hot summer day. Each of them has somewhere they need to be and being stuck is a HUGE inconvenience.  You’ve got the nice guy, Karl (Aidan Gillen), the young woman that wants nothing more than to see her dying grandmother, Claudia (Amber Tamblyn) and you’ve got your stereotypical punk, with a heart of gold, Tommy (Armie Hammer). These three people are forced to sit in a jammed elevator while the things they need to get done continue to go for naught. That’s it. They start to snap under the pressure until Claudia and Tommy realize that Karl is completely f*cking nuts. Every once in a while the elevator drops a bit to add some tension. There you have it folks.

Where do I begin? I mean, I might as well start with the acting. I was kind of excited to see this because I’ve had a thing for Tamblyn since, well, since she played one of the victims in remake of The Ring. She was even pretty hot in The Grudge 2, but somehow they managed to make her absolutely hideous in this film. Now, I’m not saying she had great stuff to work with in The Grudge 2, but in both that and The Ring she was a rather decent actress. Something must have happened during the year in between because she was dreadful. Maybe it was the directing, maybe it was the script (more on that later), but she was completely wasted and she acted like a bitch half the time, and a saint the other half, making it so uneven that about half way through you just don’t care anymore. On top of that, you’ve got you Hammer playing the punk, Tommy. At least he didn’t have as much to say or do (since he spends most of the time either trying to look good or on the ground with a broken bone), but he was pretty throwaway in terms of acting. Nothing stands out about him. I would have to say that Aidan Gillen made the best of the limited material he had. He wasn’t great. Not even that good, but he stood out in comparison to the people that he played opposite. He’s about the most generic killer you could come up with, but there was still something overly spooky about the way he changed and would snap suddenly (like when he didn’t get his cigarette), but again, this might be because the script so closely followed that of Cube that he could just mimic the character traits of the bad guy in that one.

The script. Oh, man, the script. What the hell was that? OK, the back-stories weren’t that bad. Hell, they were pretty damn believable, but once the characters all end up in the elevator, common sense and simple storytelling techniques really start to go out the window. I understand they were under a lot of stress, and I understand that people do some crazy stuff when they’re pushed too far, but some of this was really just grasping at straws. I’m going to describe a back story that was pretty realistic, but I’m not sure if it was (don’t worry the other two were). So, Karl ends up seducing a woman, bringing her back to her place and cracks her neck so she’s paralyzed. He then proceeds to strip her, cut a weird design on her body and rub himself with salt (!?!?!?) before raping her. Yeah, we get it, he’s sick. I just wonder how the hell can you snap someone’s neck with such precision that you perfectly paralyze them without A) Killing them or B) Just making their neck sore. Whatever. Shit like that happens all over. I could also bring up the confusing ending as you’re led to believe they were trapped really high up on the elevator, but after all the mini-drops it goes through, throughout the flick, you think they have hit bottom by the end of the 85 minutes. This is on top of the useless side-stories used to pad the running time (we get that she needs her inhaler and Karl likes to smoke, so it’s going to cause problems…move along).

It wasn’t all fire and brimstone for Blackout. I felt the same way I did about Midnight Meat Train (even though MMT was miles better then Blackout). It was a very empty story, but visually they managed some neat tricks. The elevator seemed enormous, and the dark colors and gritty lighting really worked in Blackout’s favor.

You can’t talk about the good technical stuff without bringing up the fact that the other technical stuff and the music were about as generic as you get. If you get hooked on the visual images of the film, prepare to be immediately lulled to sleep by the uber-generic electronica/rock soundtrack found in such hits as Saw and Resident Evil (catching the sarcasm, ‘cuz I’m laying it on kind of thick).

Overall, Blackout is just another film that was made to turn a quick profit on the DTV market (at least that’s how it came across) and some rather decent actors are wasted on a terrible script that wishes it had a life of its own. A new outer shell doesn’t make up for the same old crap on the inside. Some terrible CGI gore really brought down what could have been a bad film, into the terrible territory.

EXTRAS;

INTERVIEWS WITH THE CAST AND CREW:

Amber Tamblyn: An interview with the lead actress about her past, how she got involved in the film and what her take on the project was.

Valerio Morabito: An interview with the producer of the film. He talks about how he came across the story in a book store, how he usually gets ideas for films, the differences between the script and the book, and his thoughts on the theme of the film.

Alejandro Martinez: An interview with the cinematographer of the film. He talks about how he met with the director and how he chose the shooting style. It was interesting to hear how from the very beginning of bringing him on board they were already planning how they were going to shoot and what look they were going for.

Rigoberto Castaneda: An interview with the director of the film. The interview starts off with his history in directing and how he became influenced to become a director. He also goes into the casting of Blackout, how they went into pre-production, and what went into the final product.

TRAILER: Theatrical Trailer.