a review of

ok. i have to be real. this movie seldom bored me. it also made me laugh out loud a bunch of times, though usually as a result of cringe-induced shock. if you watch this movie and think it is deeply revolutionary, i encourage you to absorb some actually revolutionary history and stories. much like the super-overrated movie "don't look up", the general population of the us, which is largely incapable of critical thinking, seem to be watching this and coming to the conclusion "look they're calling out the other side, lol, i love it so much". but people of all walks of life and all political leanings can watch this and come to that conclusion. that isn't a good thing. that means the movie doesn't really have shit to say about anything. if the movie was presenting the characters from an objective viewpoint, it would be fair to conclude that pta was letting people draw their own conclusions about the movie. but when you present the characters in a clearly stylized, hyperbolized, and caricaturized manner...you ARE saying something morally about the characters, and that deserves to be called into question when thinking about the film as a work of art. is the writing honest? i would say no. the movie spends almost as much time poking fun at the left as it does poking fun at fucking spray tanned homoerotic kkk eugenicists like the people currently running the us government. those people are nazis. the framing of resisting nazis as "terrorism" is a hilariously bad take, and one that this movie actually presents to us. i think the movie allows christmas adventurers too much leeway to potentially be able to walk out of the experience with their head held high. jokes about pronouns? give me a fucking break dude. making one of the rats a black woman revolutionary and the other rat a nonbinary person. things like this reveal the biases of the storyteller. it's not cute. really, at the end, comes across like it's written and directed by a white dude who thinks "i don't have a racist bone in my body. my hands are clean." well...kinda fuck that. comes across like a movie that people on the left are gonna eat up because they're mad at spray tan hitler (rightfully) and are choosing to take a hopeful message from this. c'mon y'all. the fact that we can be fooled this easily is part of the exact reason our country is being permanently destroyed by white supremacists. we all need to do a lot fucking better. the movie does present one interesting viewpoint, which is revealed in watching leo's anxious, frazzled response to the situations while the latinx folks are just powering through. it's directly stated and also readily apparent that the latinx folks have already been in this fight for a looong time. kudos for that. there are parts of this that are five stars...there are also parts of this that are two stars. y'all got high on drugs and broke the letter box.