Review of Red Rocket (2021) by Moviemitch96 — 25 Dec 2021

In this raunchy indie comedy, and directed by Sean Baker ('The Florida Project'), Simon Rex stars as Mikey Saber, a washed up porn star who returns to his small Texas hometown in hopes of getting by and starting anew.

There, he encounters his estranged wife, drug dealers, job-hiring difficulty, and a potential new romantic interest in a young 17-yr-old donut shop girl. Baker's the kind of director who specializes in what I like to refer to as "white-trash cinema", films that specialize in detailing the lives of the lower class and ghetto small towns and the poor sleazy people that live there.

He did this with 'The Florida Project' as well, and he does it again here to somewhat amusing effect. The film starts off humorous and intriguing enough, but the further it goes on, the more trashy, sleazy, and all-around smutty and gratuitous it becomes to the point of no return.

I couldn't have cared last about any of these hicks, and while Rex undeniably gives a confident, albeit rather cocky (no pun intended) lead performance, even he's near impossible to root for or sympathize with, causing trouble and BS everywhere he goes throughout the film from start to finish.

And I'm sorry, but watching him try to groom a hardly legal 17-yr-old girl into a relationship with him and into the porn industry did not sit right with me at all! The story is wandering and aimless and just feels all-around pointless and like a whole lot of nothing by the time the credits rolled.

Overall, it's a complete sleazeball of a film with zero redeemable characters and an excessively smutty story.