Disclaimer. I am not the target market for this movie. It has been the subject of some discussion in the bars of Montevideo, suggesting that the film might have a feminist slant, so seeing it was on, randomly, in Cinemateca, I proposed to C that we go and see it. On the plus side, the film possesses an interesting structural take, revisiting the same story three times, like a wonky dialectic, in order to arrive at the synthesis of men beating the shit out of each other. Clearly men beating the shit out of each other isn’t an overly feminist premise. Neither is Ben Affleck romping with a bevy of naked teenage girls. (Editorial note: Maybe they weren’t teenagers.) Neither, to be honest, is replaying a rape scene twice, with the second occasion adding precisely nothing to our dramatic understanding of the situation. I can’t help thinking that the writers would have liked to have pushed the script in the third act, presented from the female point of view, towards the slant that the victim secretly desired the rapist, which is where her story appears to be heading. Until they realised that this was such a heinous storyline that they had to backtrack and were stuck with repeating the scene without any real rationale. All in all this felt like a boy’s story, lots of yomping and spurting blood, dressed up as a post-macho story, a dubious conceit which Affleck’s exaggerated performance reveals to be a complete contradiction. With a director as multi-faceted as Ridley Scott, as with a duel to the death, you win some, you lose some.
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