The promo poster should have warned me off. It’s hard to take John Travolta seriously at the best of times, but when he’s cast in a movie that requires him to sport a beard/hair combo made of fuzzy felt, a homemade bow and arrow and an off-the-shelf Eastern European accent, it’s impossible to say the signs weren’t writ large.
But having left The Viewer unattended for several days, I felt I owed her a little. After all, while a war veteran grudge movie set in the wilds of the Appalachian Mountains might not leap to mind as the most entertaining way to while away a Sunday afternoon, Robert De Niro is in it. Not only would The Viewer be placated for a few hours, thus sparing the skirting boards a good kicking, I was comforted by the sight of Mr De Niro’s craggy face peering out from the movie poster. No film starring the talented method man could be a complete car crash, surely?
Well, it turns out De Niro is way more talented than any of us thought. If you asked him now, he would, without a shadow of a dodgy beard, tell you that he’d never even heard of ‘Killing Season’, let alone spent several months of his life yomping around the woods with a leg injury in pursuit of Johnny T. I don’t know how they did it, but my best guess is they shot him with a fast acting tranquiliser dart in a New York deli, made him act for a few months, then returned him. He has no memory of the incident. He can act in his sleep. The proof is here.
The Viewer, of course, loved it. But then, there isn’t much demand for a cogent back story and functional narrative in Geordie Shore. To her, Emil Kovac’s (Travolta) mission to avenge events that took place during the war in Bosnia was perfectly plausible. His pursuit of a retired war veteran through picturesque woodland, punctuated with the exchange of increasingly debilitating and ridiculous injuries was fine for her and she didn’t even notice that as each man used his recovery time to expand on his motivation via two way radio, it was increasingly evident that we were watching the blockbuster equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb.
I think it was the gore that sustained her. She loves gratuitous violence and made notes throughout. Over the next few weeks the least I can expect is to be shot through the leg with a crossbow bolt, then suspended in in the air by the piece of string run through the resulting calf wound and pinned to the wall by an arrow through my mouth. If I actually had a piece of shrapnel in my leg, I wouldn’t hesitate to tear it out with my own hands and stab her in the face with it. Like Bob did.
At least once they’d knackered themselves out they made friends. This, at present, remains my only hope of survival.
Kelly Welles 