Review of Red State (2011) by Angela P — 19 Feb 2012

As the front cover says: "An unlikely film from that Kevin Smith." I enjoyed that Smith branched out, but his edits looked cheap, and some of the dialogue was overdone. Where he got it right, though, was in the monologues he wrote for the leader of the ultra-Christian sect at Cooper's Dell; filtered through the gigantic performance Michael Parks gives, they really bring the insanity and the manipulation to life.

With fun small parts by Stephen Root and Kevin Pollak, plus John Goodman as an angry ATF agent, there's a lot going for this film, but the religious zealots are just too two-dimensional to take the film seriously.

Lots of good lines and guns going off, but nothing too special going on here.