You title your movie “Hobo With a Shotgun,” you build in certain expectations. It’s going to be violent. VERY violent. It’s going to be out there. It’s going to be camp, like “Snakes on a Plane.”
That seems to have been the idea Jason Eisener had when he did the fake trailer for this Rutger Hauer film, part of the movie “Grindhouse” a few years back.
But unlike Robert Rodriguez’s “Machete,” which went from mock trailer to feature film with its mad, satiric and over-the-top violent promise kept, “Hobo” hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny and occasionally preachy piece, with only the estimable Hauer to recommend it.
Hauer is the titular hobo here, a wino on the streets of a dystopian city of the near future. He’s homeless and on the streets for a reason. He longs for a lawnmower he sees in a junk-shop window — some reminder of his past?
The world he wanders through is monstrously cruel, with corrupt cops, pedophile Santas and rich crime bosses getting their jollies off the graphic suffering of others.Movies like this need balance between hero and villain. None of the no-names hired to play bad guys are in the same profession, much less the same league, as Rutger Hauer.
Hauer’s hobo is literally spat upon, sees the horrific cruelty (one bit involves manhole covers and a sick punishment straight out of the movie “Caligula,” another forcing poor people to eat glass) and finally, 16 minutes in, takes action and takes up arms. Actually, one “arm,” a pump-action shotgun.
It’s sadism vs. no-holds- barred vengeance as this seemingly anonymous street person saves a hooker (Molly Dunsworth) and becomes a tabloid newspaper hero: “Hobo Stops Begging, Demands Change.”
That’s funny, but it’s as clever as the John Davies script gets.
“Hobo With a Shotgun” will likely soon go to video, where those who enjoy this sort of thing can enjoy it in the privacy of their own home and not mingle with the human race.
And on behalf of that human race, let me just say, “Whew.”
