Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Walau
Film review by James LaFond
The middle-class counterpart to Vince Vaughn’s Brawl in Cell Block 99, is a nearly identical story save for the social class of the protagonist. Rather than a doomed working class man, slated for extinction based on uncompromising ethics, the upscale hero played by Nikolaj Coster-Walau is doomed to fall into the abyss based on the racial politics of prison, which leave a white man doing time the choice of joining a white prison gang or getting raped.
The hero must forever sever himself from his estranged family. The system offers no prospect of redemption in this high end whitesploitation movie, in which a fallen white man has no path back to civic decency. Like Brawl in Cell Block 99, Shot Caller addresses the singular issue, the one straw that has broken the postmodern Aryan camel’s back in the manger, the fact that incarceration for a felony effectively ends any paleface’s chance at a decent life and places him among the felonious races as the priority target for law enforcement, played by a three-race team of law officers with the immense federal hard-on for white identified criminals, who nevertheless respect this man.
The heroic theme is lukewarm in that this hero out-thinks more than he outfights his lessers and his betters. However, the pillar of the shot caller’s moral compass is the same as that of the other white genocide movie under discussion—family. Both heroes, the working class and the upper class, throw their lives away to reserve the remnants of their tiny nuclear families, all of meaning left to them in a mean, meaningless world. The whiggerization and traitorous nature of many white-identified criminals is addressed as a pitfall almost equal to the vastly evil system, which is rendered minimally evil but realistically faceless and soulless.
This movie has too many twists and turns and James Bond like solutions to be truly heroic, but is pleasing, masculine-affirming and might be stomached by the frails in your life.
Lynn, I have approved this movie for your viewing. However, you must not view Brawl in Cellblock 99 until you have seen Black Dynamite or Super Fly.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dad.
DeleteJames LaFond, thank you for this movie review and recommendation.
ReplyDeleteI saw an identical patriotic or civilizational theme running through both though.
Also, Shot Caller had many elements that made me think of the 2015 movie Sicario. Have you seen that one?
I had a longer comment but deleted it to avoid spoiling anything. In a nutshell, I basically disagree with your view on why they threw their lives away. As I saw it, in all three, country, or maybe even a larger idea of civilization, was part of it.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Christopher. I tend to look at things from a more individualistic perspective.
DeleteI would say that in Shot Caller, the #1 motivation of the hero was his family and that #2 was his notion of society, both of which had heroic underpinnings.
In Brawl in Cellblock 99, I see the character more conflicted, torn between his family on one hand and society and his code of honor on the other. He is nationalistic, Christian and masculine--therefore more complex and less transformative than his upper class counterpart--and finds no way to align those higher values with the lower order of society or civilization [civilization being a degenerate state of being], getting along to avoid conflict with the master class, so to speak. Unlike the hero in Shot Caller, the hero in Brawl is never a slave and is at odds with civilization from the outset, hence he only makes sense as a man of faith, where his upper class opposite can operate on simple ethical and calculated lines. So one character is more complex and the other has a more complex test, rendering him ultimately into his more barbaric [and therefore more human, less domesticated and more disciplined, domestication rendering self-discipline unnecessary] requiring him to be caged away from society, while the more organic hero cannot be contained by the cage and must die fighting against it.
Back to Shot Caller, I'd say that he was able to find a way to align his notion of a decent slave society [which I think is a false notion] with his notion of family and sacrificed himself to serve both.
Both of these characters find a way to align family with society and in so doing have to cut themselves out of both. The difference between the two is really class-based with no notion of nationalism but of generic civility informing the hero in Shot Caller, while the working class hero in Brawl discovers--more truthfully, I think--that coexisting in a civil manner with diverse cultures in the civil society treasured in Shot Caller, conflicts directly with his notion of nationality and his religion--which, again, is absent in Shot Caller.
I see both movies as valid explorations of heroism according to the very different vision of society that each of these very different heroes have, and that they do--as you point out--demonstrate a concern for society that runs counter to their ideal of family and that they manage to accommodate both by extinguishing their own selfish hopes of enjoying either.
I'm of the opinion that both of our assessments are accurate and not expansive enough. Of course, we both expressed our views according to the writing dictum that brevity has its own quality.
Essentially these were the same story for two widely different classes of paleface people.
I have not seen Sicario and will look into it.
Thanks.
James
Watch the wild bunch. I guarantee it will meet you high standards.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to look for it on You Tube right now. I won't be able to get any of my family members who have TVs to watch something made before 1990. They are all hopelessly postmodern--especially the seniors, who are more prone to media control--and don't have the patience to view anything with pre 1990s pacing. 2 shot gun rounds--4 from a twelve gauge, just went off down the street, 5 rounds. I think they're reloading.
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