Sacrifice

A propulsive (and hilarious) comedy that gradually melts into a dreamlike (and not so hilarious) modern fable, this hyper-stylized whatsit might be at its best when shooting fish in a barrel, but Gavras’ film is much less interested in poking fun at easy targets than it is in leveraging its characters — terrorist and hostage alike — towards unformed ideas about truth, performance, and the cleansing power of death in the face of a society so ego-driven that it’s impossible to tell the difference between heroes and clowns.

As a ridiculous tale of a celebrity trying to make himself matter, Sacrifice is quite a bit of fun, but any attempt to make a larger point falls flat, just like so many films before it.

Rambunctiously riffing on celebrity, activism, technology and economic inequality, this dark satire works best when the director’s swirl of images achieves a hypnotic, primal rush. At other times, Sacrifice is as muddled as the terrorists’ plan.

The film is ultimately too sentimental and not acidic enough because it can never really bear itself to bring down the world from which it’s borne. If there’s a point to which it feels more like an unfunny inside joke than anything, perhaps that’s the grim reality of the world we face: it can’t bring itself to make the actual sacrifice and solve the problem.

Messy, strange, and somewhat baffling, Gavras’ film is chaos personified. For this sometimes funny film, I wish that were a good thing.

Gavras awkwardly swaps politically charged potency in exchange for an unmemorable satirical take-down of those contributing to our planet’s ongoing environmental destruction.

Credit where credit is due, Sacrifice ultimately made me seriously consider the prospect of death while watching it. However, this mostly came from a desire for it all to end so we no longer had to keep enduring the inescapably vapid and shallow film unraveling before us.