Review: Alas, Kevin Smith's Red State (2011) is an artistic mess and a social/political failure.

Red State
2011
88 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

There is something almost heartbreaking about seeing a popular filmmaker finally getting the chance to make his or her passion project, only to watch said film turn out to be an utter wreck and completely irrelevant both to cinema and to the subject matter that it attempts to discuss.  Such is Kevin Smith's Red State.  It is a failure on nearly every level and counter-intuitive to the ideas it seemingly wants to express.  Despite a cast of fine actors young and old, the film is a structural mess and resembles nothing less than the kind of bargain-basement direct-to-DVD thrillers that have littered the Netflix queues and Blockbuster shelves over the last ten years.  Whether or not this is Kevin Smith's worst film is beside the point (I have only seen about half of his films).  What matters is that Red State was his chance to put all of his cards on the table, to make a grand statement about a subject close to his heart.  Yet with a cast of his choosing and apparently no limitations beyond budget, Smith has failed artistically and ideologically. 

How Kevin Smith's Red State could have been the new face of Video On Demand.

There are people with stronger feelings one way or another about Kevin Smith than I. I loved Clerks II and Dogma, hated Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, liked Clerks and Chasing Amy, and I have yet to see Mallrats, Zack and Miri Make A Porno, Jersey Girl or Cop Out. So I'm not going to get terribly worked up over the hurt feelings allegedly inspired by Smith's decision to distribute Red State in the classic Road Show style (sometimes called 'four-walling'), taking the film around the country as if it were a traveling circus attraction. It would seem that Smith is, if anything, guilty of announcing a perfectly-okay personal choice in a manner that put him in a most negative light. Similar to James's press-conference last summer, Smith basically failed at that whole 'tact' thing. James had every right to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers after seven years, but the self-aggrandizing press-conference probably wasn't the best way to go about it. Same thing here: if Smith wanted to turn his film into some kind of sideshow exhibit, then more power to him. But perhaps the Sundance Film Festival wasn't the best place to criticize the various means of distribution for smaller films (while showing a token amount of ignorance about how smaller films are marketed), especially after (allegedly) implying that the film was going to be put up for sale following the first screening last night. More importantly, even if much of the fanboy criticism of Smith was truly overblown, Kevin Smith doesn't realize that he missed out on the chance to truly be a pioneer.

Kevin Smith's Red State gets a trailer.

This looks pretty sharp, and the cast (John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Kevin Pollack, Stephen Root, Kyle Gallner, Michael Angarano, and Kerry Bishé) demands our attention. Still, and this is based off of a 60 second teaser and a brief plot blurb from IMDB, the film seems to be treading the same ground as From Within, with a dash of a more serious 2001 Maniacs tossed in for good measure. The film screens at Sundance in under a month, so we'll have a pretty good idea of what we're in for soon enough. Say what you will about Kevin Smith, but never bet against him when he's dealing with material that he gives a damn about (Dogma, Clerks II).

Scott Mendelson