Review of Pontypool (2009) by Mad M — 16 Jun 2011
A premise that threatens to explode into brilliance eventually just fizzles out to nothing but pretentious silliness. The film's tone veers wildly from claustrophobic tension to winking self-satisfied camp.
The notion that a virus travels from host to host via language is a great idea, but it is so idiotically developed here that it loses any chance of being taken seriously. How the hell does a virus infect certain words? The only way this would work would be if the virus lay dormant within the mind of every human being, like relical junk DNA, and was activated by one or a few unique words alone, causing madness.
Think how much more frightening that would be--everyone is already infected, and there is no way of finding out what the trigger word(s) are, as the instant you come across them you start going mad. A virulent new strain of meme! There, I just came up with a far more realistic explanation than the film's, which posits the virus can hijack any word, and is somehow not only able to make the host go insane, but can also make them projectile vomit buckets of brown goo.
Uhu. Even worse is a stupid, Godard-fellating after credits epilogue that has nothing to do with the film that precedes it. Such a wasted opportunity.
This review of Pontypool (2009) was written by Mad M on 16 Jun 2011.
Pontypool has generally received positive reviews.
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