Assassination Nation

Piece by piece, Assassination Nation lays out and deconstructs the misogynistic assumptions that underpin many of our reactions to the girls’ behaviour.

Energetically lurid, gratuitously violent and a hell of a lot of fun, horror-satire Assassination Nation is a throwback to black-comedy teen flicks of yore, but with a bitingly timely feel.

As Levinson swings wildly for the fences, Assassination Nation yields a modicum of payoff.

Assassination Nation tells you right up front what to be appalled by, then simply delivers what it promised. Unlike the best examples of either horror or satire, it ultimately comforts and confirms rather than challenges.

Assassination Nation won’t get any points for narrative cohesion or character development, but it’s a timely, visually arresting statement about how pandemonium in this country threatens to become the new norm.

While sometimes messy, this material is emotionally resonant and cinematically alive.

From the get-go, Levinson makes every wrongheaded directorial decision imaginable in an apparent effort to make one loathe Assassination Nation—and his success in that regard proves this teensploitation schlock’s lone triumph.

Hilarious, disturbing, and unexpectedly intelligent - if you don't get too triggered Centred around a quartet of unapologetically shallow teen girls more concerned with getting likes on Instagram than decent grades, and culminating in an orgy of gender-demarcated violence, Assassination Nation seems to set out to try to offend everyone - from the social justice warriors on the left to the second amendment fetishisers on the right, from Millennial snowflakes to Baby boomers who can't get their head around why going viral is so important. The satirical ire of writer/director Sam Levinson, however, is aimed more specifically at those who tend to see the proclivities of sexually "aggressive" (i.e., sexually confident) young women through misogyny-tinted glasses (the type of insecure males who believe the term "toxic masculinity" is an oxymoron). It does run out of steam in its third act, and, overall, it tries to take on too many issues. Nevertheless, it's a smart and humorous commentary on a society becoming ever more defined by online hysteria and the concomitant erosion of traditional concepts of privacy. The film tells the story of four relatively normal high-school friends, Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef), Em (Abra), and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse). When half of the population of their home town is hacked, and all their data made public, the quartet, and Lily in particular, find themselves at the dangerous centre of a rapidly escalating situation, as the town becomes increasingly militarised and polarised. Assassination Nation works primarily, if not wholly, by way of exaggeration, hyperbole, and embellishment. Taking as its starting point the fear that female agency (particularly regarding sexuality) can instil in the patriarchal status quo, it hypothesises what might happen if that fear is pushed to the extreme. In this sense, Levinson addresses how previously frowned-upon right-wing and/or misogynist views have gained a degree of social acceptability and mainstream visibility during Donald Trump's presidency. Levinson sets the tone immediately, opening the film with a rapidly edited montage that shows a series of clips, each one labelled with a requisite "trigger warning", including toxic masculinity, the male gaze, sexism, violence, gore, and fragile male egos. This abrasive, confrontational, self-reflexive style continues for much of the film, which is purposely designed to confront, provoke, and challenge. How the film deals with the male gaze is especially interesting. An early shot shows the four girls walking into school in slow motion as the camera starts at their feet and slowly pans up their bare legs before moving around behind them. You couldn't get a more textbook example of a cinematic male gaze. However, towards the end of the film, the exact same shot is repeated, but in this instance, the girls are effectively going to war, something the film draws to the audience's attention by replicating the form of the earlier shot - the male gaze is reproduced so as to satirise and ridicule it. Another aesthetically interesting scene occurs after the data dump, but prior to people turning on one another, learning that her best friend has been mocking her behind her back, an acquaintance of the central quartet takes a baseball bat, finds her friend in the school gym, and cracks her over the head. The scene starts out normal enough, but soon the camera turns upside-down and we see the girl standing against an unrealistically large American flag. Turning the camera upside-down like this mid-shot and using the flag in this way indicates that there has been some kind of paradigm shift. Indeed, speaking of the American flag, it's a recurring motif, but we rarely see it without a gun nearby. Make of that what you will. One of the film's strengths, but also one of its weaknesses, is the sheer volume of issues with which it engages; misogyny, feminism, fempowerment, social media, sexual assault, #MeToo, bullying, gun culture, toxic masculinity, the male gaze, racism, gang mentality, digital privacy, desensitisation, mansplaining. Unfortunately, because it tries to deal with so much, many of the issues are only glanced at. This has the side-effect of making it seem thematically scattershot. Aside from dealing with too many themes, if the film has a defining flaw, it's that the last act essentially turns into The Purge (2013), wherein the girls turn into the leaders of a vigilante group facing off against the intolerance of right-wing jingoism, a conflict drawn primarily, although not exclusively, along gender lines. It's a disappointingly simplistic dénouement given the complexity of the preceding narrative. Depicting a cultural anxiety that is uniquely contemporary, Assassination Nation taps into something inherently new in human culture, and is an unexpectedly smart film examining weighty topics of great importance to the current socio-political moment.

Crazy ass movie. What people can really be driven to do when necessary is crazy. I liked this movie.

Weirdly enough was better than expected. Like I liked the social commentary on media and how everyone nowadays does stupid stuff without thinking about consequences but also how people sometimes get mistreated wrongfully just because of something on internet. Like internet trolling becomes real life bullying

I get the social commentary this flick is making but this is a movie that doesn't know what it wants to be (Horror, Comedy, Action) and for that we are left with this mess.

Visually appealing at times, but that couldn't save this godawful story line. It was completely walkout-able. I stuck it out to see if there were any redeeming qualities and I assure you there are none. Completely not the movie that you expect. Action scenes are short, lame, and definitely too little too late. If you want to waste time of your life and money for a film you absolutely will hate, well this is it.