Viking Night: Near Dark
By Bruce Hall
April 13, 2017
I can live with a certain level of contrivance in a Vampire Road Flick; that’s fine. And trust me; I’m fine with violence in movies (video games desensitized me long ago). What bothers me is that such a great performance by Henriksen is diminished by the fact that his character is such a seething moron. It’s disappointing when a villain is presented as a criminal genius, only to consistently make the kinds of decisions that would get you a C minus in sixth grade creative writing. Maybe it was a conscious decision, so as not to distract from what’s supposed to be the center of the film - the relationship between Caleb and Mae.
That’s also kind of stupid, because if I hate anything more than the Idiot Mastermind, it’s Pretty Faces falling in love for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I kept waiting for Caleb to curse her for condemning him to an eternal waking hell of roaming the night, sucking on morbidly obese truckers. Even if you were kind of INTO being a vampire, that’s a bad omen, right at the beginning of a relationship. Chalk it up to the folly of youth, I guess. At my age, getting stabbed in the back - or bitten in the neck - ten minutes into the first date is a goddamn deal breaker.
I suppose this is where Kathryn Bigelow can say “Yeah, well, later I made The Hurt Locker and you didn’t, asshole.”
Fair point. You win this round, Bigelow. But it would also be fair to say that even as a genre film, Near Dark is, overall, weak. Aside from my earlier praise of Henriksen, and a classically unhinged Bill Paxton (I would be totally supportive of a Director’s Cut featuring ten more minutes of him), there’s little to recommend. Near Dark is an undead murder-fest that secretly wants to be a love story, which would have been fine if either one had been executed worth a damn.
In fact, did I say “wisp” of a story? I might be a little off on that. How many smidgens are in a wisp?
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