I considered seeing Assassination Nation in theaters because I love to see women kick ass, but my gut cautioned me not to because I never got a clear sense of the story in spite of the summary seeming fairly straightforward. A town believes that a teenage girl is responsible for hacking into and leaking the town residents’ personal online information so they try to kill her and her three friends. I’m really excited that STEM is trying to narrow the gender gap in certain academic disciplines, and that these allegations go against gender norms, but if you saw her, you would not think that she was capable of doing that.
It would be easier if I could dismiss Assassination Nation completely because it is not a good movie, but it has moments. A crucial difference between paying homage or alluding to other work versus ripping off other people’s work is how the viewer perceives it because the reference does not make us feel in a similarly to when we first encountered a concept. This movie feels like it copied The Purge without completely understanding why viewers keep coming back to the franchise. The Purge franchise successfully taps into the meanest vein of our society, only takes it a few degrees to the extreme so it feels like a plausible next step then cathartically counters it by making the victims turn the tables.
Assassination Nation’s denouement and backbone is solid: teenage girls and women are blamed for everything and victimized unfairly so they should violently defend themselves. Our nation is plagued with “righteousness and hypocrisy.” It has some viscerally powerful moments when it pairs the audio of happy memories of the beginning of a relationship with the visual of an abusive dynamic at the end. There is one great intimate confession between friends under covers that shows the movie knows how to modulate its tone and does not confuse volume with power, but unfortunately those scenes are few. I think that it nails how parents react more violently to a daughter transgressing than a son. One deserves castigation and disassociation whereas the other deserves support, concern and understanding even though the girl is held to a higher standard than the law would. I would also issue a trigger warning for a scene that was shockingly too close to Matthew Shepard’s murder.
Assassination Nation made a fatal mistake. It should have had one main character to root for instead of four characters. Two underdeveloped characters seemingly exist for pure aesthetic purposes: the token black girl and her white sister. Lady Bird managed to not explain a mixed family, which worked because they felt like a family and any exposition explaining the composition of that family would feel clunky and unrealistic, which this movie seemed to embrace as a governing rule for dialogue so I don’t think that a back story would further detract from the movie. If it is an excuse to use Anika Noni Rose, they should have thought more creatively. The uninteresting lead character and narrator personifies having your cake and eating it too—i.e. bemoan the sexualization of teenage girls while sexualizing teenage girls. I think that the right woman writer could have helped prevent this problem and walked the high wire act of embracing sexuality and rejecting exploitation. A trans teenage girl is the heart of the story, but perhaps because of marketability, the movie downplayed her. The filmmakers chose the wrong person to centralize. I bet that they visualized the denouement and reverse engineered how to get there instead of thinking of a more cohesive story.
Assassination Nation used a split screen technique fairly early. It always sounds like a good idea because it gives the viewer a way to know what is going on simultaneously to different characters. I barely remember anything about the movie, but I haven’t seen it done since I saw Time Code in theaters, and with good reason. It results in the viewer disengaging and being less invested in the plot because there is too much to absorb. It detracts rather than enhances a movie. If there is a movie that utilizes the visual narrative technique effectively, please let me know.
The parallels to and modernization of the Salem Witch Trials didn’t work for me. Those girls turned the mob in their favor and started targeting innocent people with their false but admissible testimony. It has been a few decades since I read The Crucible, which is a play and not history, but I don’t think that it got the basics wrong. Sorry Assassination Nation writers, you’re no Arthur Miller. Maybe without making that heavy-handed and explicit allusion, I would have enjoyed the movie more.
Assassination Nation’s casting has some hits and misses. If the character with the moniker Daddy was supposed to be a surprise, it was a poorly hidden one, and I’m glad that he wanted to have some range, but it didn’t work. (Who was in the bathtub?) He didn’t transition against type when needed at the end. I don’t think that I’m familiar with Bella Thorne, but she looks like if Jennifer Garner and Jessica Chastain had a baby. I love Colman Domingo and Kathryn Erbe, but they felt underutilized here, particularly Domingo who just gets dropped like a hot potato in the narrative. I didn’t recognize It’s Bill Skarsgard, but his scenes, unlike Daddy’s, felt plausibly terrifying as if things could escalate in a really horrific way. Hari Nef nailed her first role. As I mentioned earlier, it was great to have Rose, but we needed more of her.
Assassination Nation is like a person wearing too many accessories but without the élan to pull it off so the chintzy stuff that you got on sale at the mall obscures the truly valuable items. It was too busy. I’m glad that I waited until it was available for home viewing. It needed more revisions before the final draft came out in theaters. If you don’t mind slogging through a lot of teenage musings and flash disguised as deepness to get to a great denouement, then see it otherwise it is neither entertaining nor edifying enough to carry your interest for the entire one hour forty-eight minute run time.