Review of The Midnight Meat Train (2008) by Chads. — 05 Aug 2008

Brooke Shields, microfiche, a shout-out to American neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, okay, we get it, "Midnight Meat Train" is neither contemporary, nor self-consciously a period piece of the recent past.

We're in the midnight movie world. The set-up is fine. Butcher by day, serial killer by night, Mahogany(Vinnie Jones) is, if anything, a literary villian. Standing in his way of unchecked slaughtering, a vegetarian shutterbug, Leon Kauffman(Bradley Cooper), a photo artist who sees something in a picture that he shouldn't have, like an ersatz Michaelangelo Antoinini protagonist.

The cops think he's crazy; his girlfriend Maya(Leslie Bibb), too. This is when "The Midnight Meat Train" takes a wrong turn and gets a little muddled. Gradual changes in Leon's personality suggests that he's undergoing a transformation; for instance, he orders a steak.

But why does the tofu fan order a steak? Was it predestined that this law-abiding man stumble upon this secret world? At one point, Mahogany seems to be grooming Leon to take his place, but later in the film, he's trying to kill him.

With its allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt"(Leon learning about Mahogany's history at the library, Leon throwing Mahogany off the train), Leon becomes the Joseph Cotten character in the Hitchcock film, who learns that "the world is a foul sty", that "the world's a hell".

Susan Hoff(Brooke Shields) told Leon to find the city, and boy, did he find more than he bargained for. In the bowels of the city, the vegetarian learns about his true nature. Marred by some bad melodrama between Leon and his weepy girlfriend, and the horror movie cliche of characters putting themselves in harm's way, "The Midnight Meat Train" works as a hyper-real nightmare that doesn't take itself too seriously, and almost overcomes its deficiencies in tone(Leon becomes a maniacal conspiracy theorist mode after one trip to the library) and logic(we only meet one person on the outside who's engaged in the cover-up).