Reviews Film / Rampage 2009

Trilogyitis

It's no secret that Uwe Boll is not a fantastic director. Between the trashy tax-fraud films and video game tragedies, there is very little of value. Rampage, however, stands out from the rest of his library. This review deals mostly with the third entry in the series.

The first Rampage film shows that Uwe is perfectly capable of making a decent B-movie, perhaps even a good film, with foreshadowing and plot elements greater than just "things happen and then other things happen". Every scene in the first film tends to relate to a prior planning scene or some form of foreshadowing. This is diminished due to the constrained budget of the second film, and completely lost in the third. The fact that this film was shot without a script is a testament to the skill of Brendan Fletcher, whose stellar acting brings the whole thing together.

The second film introduces angry political ranting and politically motivated crime to the character. Whilst what Bill says is blatantly the actual beliefs of author, the delivery and context of the lines still fits in with the film. They come off less as preachy and more the ravings of a murderous lunatic. Despite its poor budget and being constrained to a single area, it keeps its self interesting via the main character's increasing violence and decreasing sanity as the film goes on. Bill's planning is shown much less due to the budget, but it still exists in a satisfactory way.

The third film, however, comically misses the point of what people enjoyed about one and two. Instead of showing clear planning in attack, things are grandiose and barely explained. Rather than working with the small budget using the strengths of the actors and dealing with a small situation ala Rampage 2, it instead tries to be drastically larger than it should, with most of its many plot points being mentioned rather than shown. Boll was clearly aiming for a much higher angle than was possible with its budget, and failed to make changes to the script to accommodate such problems when crowdfunding failed.

The political rants, which were originally restricted to one character and highly context dependent, are now randomly pushed upon every major character. Gone is the detached, insane ranting on yoga and religion, and instead we have FBI agents breaking into a dramatic wordplay about how many minorities the police kill every year, fit with scary music and dramatic camera angles.

Uwe Boll, in the final film, had succumbed to his old filmmaking vices of disjointed, nonsensical action coupled with poor implementation of plot and misuse of budget. Brendan Fletcher's acting remains great, but it cannot save the film from its awful script. Rampage suffers from terminal trilogyitis, where the third film is so far away from what made the other entries good that it's practically whole different movie. I suppose if it can happen to the Godfather, of course it's going to happen to a German-Canadian B-movie series.