Hobo with a Shotgun, a tongue-in-cheek homage to exploitation cinema, tries to compensate for a shortage of wit with an excess of energy and demented conviction. It certainly doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas: for 86 minutes, the filmmakers bombard the screen with everything they can imagine, in the frantic hope that something will stick. Unfortunately, too few of these ideas are ingenious. The film is supposed to be a rollercoaster ride but feels more like a sugar rush.
The story, you ask? An unnamed hobo (Rutger Hauer) rides a boxcar into the ironically named Hope Town, an urban hell where he dreams of starting a landscaping business. (One of the film’s better jokes is that he has passed miles of scenic pasture during the title montage.) Instead, he finds a wasteland of whores, junkies, and corrupt cops under the thumb of maniacal crimelord the Drake (Brian Downey) and his two sadistic sons. The hobo can’t stand by idly while innocent people are tortured, decapitated, and eviscerated, so in the midst of a pawnshop robbery, he grabs a shotgun and starts blowing away the bad guys. Along the course of his bloody mission of justice, he becomes a crackpot father figure to Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a hooker with a heart of gold and Renaissance ringlets to match.
Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies draw their primary inspiration from the cycle of urban-vigilante films that began in the disillusioned 70s and peaked in the reactionary 80s. They make sport of those films’ hysterical, button-pushing politics while incorporating references to splatter flicks, Spaghetti Westerns, and post-apocalyptic epics. All of this may feel overly familiar to trash connoisseurs. One moment pays tribute to a scene from Evil Dead II that was itself a sendup of Taxi Driver, but the sequence retains a giddy kick, because there was so much inventiveness in the source material, and because there’s just enough of a twist here.
Too often, though, the makers of Hobo fail to reinvent the scraps that comprise their cinematic patchwork. I kept hoping for some exciting, funny, or gross surprise to knock me out of my seat, but I waited in vain. There’s lots of mayhem involving manhole covers, grappling hooks, ice skates, axes, and lawnmowers, but little of the madcap creativity of early Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson. Instead, it’s just madcap, because Eisener and Davies have no control over their material. They’re like hyper kids so excited about the story they’re telling they trip over their own tongues. The script has scattered flashes of sick wit, but Davies mostly relies on stale profanity, while Eisener (who also edited) needs to hone his timing for both laughs and shocks. Nor do the filmmakers know what do with the story’s more serious underpinnings. When the police chief demands that citizens start killing the homeless to appease the Drake, the satiric point about treatment of the underprivileged is lost in the headlong rush to the next thing. Similarly, Eisener and Davies raise practical and ethical questions about vigilantism, but these too are left unexplored.
Hauer’s weathered face and voice ground this material in much-needed pathos, but in a canny touch, his hobo never becomes a martyred saint — he’s a little, or maybe a lot, crazy. With his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, chief villain Downey is made up to resemble James Cagney but looks more like Al Lewis. Typical of the film’s manic overdrive, his accent seems to change with every line, and typical of its confusion, it isn’t clear if this is intentional. The music is credited to three composers and sounds as though it belongs to at least that many movies, from the Morricone-esque chant under the main titles, to the generic quasi-orchestral action themes, to the type of Casio keyboard plinking John Carpenter used to score his films. In keeping with the magpie approach, music is used not to link the various emotions of a coherent film but to evoke whatever genre is being parodied at the time.
Jason Eisener clearly loves making movies. I hope he gets to make more of them, and I hope he can grow as a filmmaker without sacrificing the energy and conviction that drive his first feature, which is the work of an overly enthusiastic fan rather than a budding genius. His film started life as the winner of the SXSW Film Festival’s 2007 fake-trailer contest, designed to promote the theatrical run of Grindhouse (which paired Robert Rodriguez’s undernourished Planet Terror with Quentin Tarantino’s pedantic Death Proof). Hobo, which is much less skillful but more likable than either of those films, has become the fourth full-length feature in the franchise and the second (after Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis’s Machete) to have been expanded from a fake trailer. Unburdened by storytelling demands, the Hobo trailer is arguably superior to the feature, and one of its best jokes is conspicuously botched in this more elaborate production. Even Machete, by far the most inspired of this lot to date, suffered from poky stretches that blunted its riotousness. Perhaps the next Grindhouse film, if there is one, should consist entirely of trailers. Like punk rock, this sort of craziness seems to work best in short bursts — does anyone really want to see a feature-length version of Werewolf Women of the SS? Don’t answer that.
