ZERO DAY A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2003 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): ***
ZERO DAY is a shamelessly exploitive, subtly pretentious mockumentary, à la THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which manages to be the funniest film about a high school gun tragedy since BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. A comedy all dressed up as a message movie, it stars Andre Keuck and Calvin Robertson as Andre and Calvin, two high school seniors who happily ham it up through the entire story until in the end when they murder their classmates.
Unlike most such mass murderers, Andre and Calvin aren't sullen, unhappy loners with clueless parents. They are happy, extremely gregarious lads with some friends and with supportive parents who try to keep track of their kids. One supposes that the film is arguing that absolutely any kids could turn extremely violent. If the film is arguing this, it wastes no time in convincing us of it since the movie offers almost zero motivation as to why these kids are methodically planning to kill their classmates.
In the time that could have been devoted to persuading the audience that these kids are walking time bombs, writer/director Ben Coccio instead concentrates on the humor. Typical of this is the scene in which Andre explains to us why they are calling their act of violence, "Zero Day." They chose it because they decided to slaughter their fellow students on the first weekday -- "not on a Jewish holiday" -- when the weather drops to zero degrees. Another joke occurs when Andre and Calvin can't decide whether they should commit suicide with a count of "one, two, three, bang" or "one, two, bang."
The movie is good -- but for the wrong reason. It's funny. The events of the tragedy are only convincing as a way to set up the jokes.
ZERO DAY runs 1:32. It is not rated but might be PG-13 for a few murky images of violence and would be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, November 21, 2003. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas. The movie was shown recently at the Camera Cinema Club (http://www.cameracinemas.com) of Campbell and San Jose. The filmmaker was scheduled to be the guest but, ironically, missed his plane because he apparently did not allow enough time to go through airport security.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email? Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 35992 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1206290 X-RT-TitleID: 1125338 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 3/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews