Southside (2002) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/
Starring Brian Austin Green, Bret Roberts, Greg Mullavy, Kaye Lenz. Directed by Billy Hayes. Unrated.
The only reason that Southside even got to make its festival rounds is because of the identity of director Billy Hayes. If that name sounds only vaguely familiar, it should: Billy Hayes is the protagonist of Midnight Express, the harrowing 1978 Turkish-prison movie, in which Hayes was played by the late Brad Davis. His own attempt at putting a story on the screen is simplistic, single-minded, hideously ugly, and almost unbearably unpleasant. It never takes its characters beyond the vulgar stereotypes that it's supposedly condemning, forcing us to watch reprehensible characters just, it seems, to rub our faces in it. There's no redemption to be found anywhere, but Hayes doesn't have anything to say about that either.
Jack O'Malley (Brian Austin Green) is an ex-boxer who blew his chance at the big time, an incident that has haunted him ever since. Now, he is a volatile drunk, terrorizing neighborhood women and getting in trouble with the police, who seem incapable of uttering any sentence that does not begin with some derivative of "If I ever see you around here again..." His friend Travis (Bret Roberts) is the boxing hotshot of the moment, a talented fighter whose specialty is winning "in the clinch," that moment when boxers "hug" on the ropes, afraid of leaving themselves open to blows.
Evidently, homophobia is/was absolutely rabid in Southside's North Jersey backdrop as slurs break the sound barrier flying off the screen. And as Travis's sexual ambiguity comes to the fore, it threatens to destroy his friendship with Jack as well as his career and maybe his life. With the Big Match coming up, these things have to be resolved, and fast, on the risk of an emotional breakdown.
There are potentially interesting conflicts here, but they are all defeated by the characters' terminal stupidity. The manifestation of Travis's suppressed sexuality -- he allegedly gets a hard-on in the clinch -- is so infantile, so fourth-grade, that instead of empathizing, we sneer, and while that may be the mental development level of the characters and the people that inhabit their world, that doesn't make the experience of watching them any more bearable. There is no voice of reason to be found anywhere that could potentially redeem them, no hint that there is hope, no implication that there is any point in watching any of this. We are left simply wallowing in the squalor, ashamed of the people we are watching and of ourselves for watching them.
Perhaps the movie doesn't go far enough. Maybe my reaction would have been different had I been shown truly degraded individuals rather than a bunch of dumbfuck kids who need a smack upside the head and some time inside an educational institution. I know hundreds of people like that, and if there is one thing they are not, it's particularly interesting; at least not when their stupidity is an end in itself. Since Southside has nothing to impart on us aside from that stupidity, it is hardly compelling.
If there's a level on which the movie could potentially have worked, it's that of a campy direct-to-video boxing B-movie. Unfortunately the movie a) dwells on what it thinks are potent sexual issues and b) is one of the ugliest professional productions I have ever seen. This may be the first movie ever that was shot on film but looks like it was shot on digital video. Hayes uses oh-so-significant slow motion not as a filmmaking device but to make sure we realize that something important has happened. This movie is so clumsy as to hurt.
This was apparently a labor of love for Billy Hayes, in the same way, I suppose, that Battlefield Earth was a labor of love for John Travolta. And just like Travolta's name got his favorite scientologist's novel to the screen, so Hayes's much less famous name got Southside filmed, appropriately with a much lower budget and a practically no-name cast. It's actually better than Battlefield Earth, though. A little.
Grade: D+
Up Next: Mile Zero
©2002 Eugene Novikov
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