Juno Temple and Thomas Dekker in Kaboom.
By John Thomason
Gregg Araki puts the “terrible” in enfant terrible.
For more than 20 years, the filmmaker has staked his dubious claim as the foremost auteur of vacuous Gen-X movies about sexually experimental hipsters. With one notable exception – the disturbing and deeply moving Mysterious Skin, which boasted the best performance of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career – his movies are stultifying glimpses into a void of hedonism and eye-rolling self-referentiality, as artistically malignant as they are intellectually deflated.
Araki’s latest, Kaboom, is essentially a science-fiction movie, albeit a subversive one that deserves some credit for wandering way off the genre’s reservation. Unfortunately, the places it wanders off to resemble the hollow vacuum of juvenilia that is home to just about every other Araki film.
The film showcases the 52-year-old writer-director at his infantile worst. His fans may hold him in a higher regard than such low-hanging directorial fruit as Kevin Smith and Dennis Dugan, but his movies are just puerile. How’s this for a priceless line of Araki dialogue, from one of his sexually liberated female characters: “If I come anymore tonight, my cooch is gonna break off.”
When he isn’t trying to shock us with his characters’ sexual frankness, Araki bombards us with pop-culture snark and litmus-test references to his favorite music and movies, from New Order to Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. “Are you worried?” asks protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) to his best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) following some strange occurrences on the college campus they share. “Does Mel Gibson hate Jews?” she replies, without missing a beat.
Araki’s cinematic fantasylands are populated exclusively by cultured, quick-witted horndogs just like these two contrived specimens, their lines dripping with their screenwriter’s self-satisfaction. Others include Juno Temple as a randy British tart with an ’80s coif and a library of Buzzcocks references, James Duval as a hippie prophet of doom and Chris Zylka as a perpetually shirtless surfer-hunk named Thor who tries to master the art of self-fellatio.
A realistic conversation between these creatures is about as rare as an intriguing shot. For Araki, the cinematography is all about a motley, eye-catching set design and a multicolored mise-en-scène that tries, unsuccessfully, to mask the director’s pedestrian eye.
Kaboom’s ramshackle plot follows around Smith and Stella as they attempt to fornicate their way through one mysterious phenomenon after another, from the real-life manifestations of recurring dreams to strangers in animal masks slaying women in the dead of night to a devious new mate who harbor powers of supernatural possession and witchcraft. It is at once a near-pornographic, bisexual college comedy, a slasher film and a paranoid political thriller, all mashed together into a scuzzy ball and spat onto the screen. Some of it is arousing, some of it mildly interesting, but most of the time, you’ll just feel icky and impatient.
By the time the picture ends, on a surprisingly fun note of anarchic, existential lunacy that is too late-too late in justifying its characters’ artificiality, you won’t care about the results. More likely, you’ll wonder why people keep letting Araki make movies.
KABOOM. Director: Gregg Araki; Cast: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, James Duval, Andy Fisher-Price, Jason Olive, Juno Temple, Chris Zylka; Distributor: IFC Films; Rating: R Now playing at Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton, Frank Gateway 4 in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Gables Art Cinema in Coral Gables.