American Carnage

After a (white) governor issues an executive order to arrest the children of undocumented immigrants, the newly detained youth are offered an opportunity to have their charges dropped by volunteering to provide care to the elderly. Once inside the facility, they soon discover a horrifyingly depraved conspiracy that endangers both the young and the old.

JP is your typical Mexican American teenager just trying to live the American dream, but that dream is shattered when the not-a-parody-at-all White Christian Bigot of a cowboy hat-wearing Governor issues an executive order, sending his eager, heavily armed and black-armored legions of jackbooted Brownshirts to do the exact same thing that White Christian America is trying to do right now in the real world.

His mother having been deported, JP finds himself in the same kind of inhumane detention center currently used by the American government to house thousands of people for the crime of not being white, and also for not being from America, or not being the right kind of American. When he’s offered an opportunity to get out early, and stay in America, by volunteering to provide care to the elderly, JP discovers that those old people are, in actuality, a broad metaphor for the active harm that is being done on a daily basis by the systemic racism that makes up not only the foundation of America, but every facet of modern day life here in this place, the greatest country on Earth.

At the very least, American Carnage knows who the real bad guy is… and that is the overwhelming majority of White America, especially those who rail on about “illegal immigrants” and those who support law enforcement in general really, especially the official Bigot Thugs of the U.S. Government, ICE. It’s not a subtle film by any means, and a bit ham-handed while it’s at it, but I can appreciate how it makes no attempt to hide or sugarcoat this indisputable fact about life in America.

So for that, American Carnage gets a big thumbs up.

But… for a movie that is only hour and forty minutes long, American Carnage certainly takes its sweet-ass time to get going. It was almost forty minutes before the film first shows its hand for real, and then it’s maybe another fifteen-twenty minutes before it really gets down to the nitty gritty… at which point, it then explains the film’s trick three times.

If asked, I’d be hard pressed to say whether this film is too long, or too slow. I don’t know, maybe both, either way, despite its clear eye and good intentions, it definitely overstays its welcome, and like a lot of the characters in the film, it ends up being a bit toothless, both in terms of gore and social commentary.

Plus, the film ends with the bad (white) guys getting punished, and who has time for god damn fairy tales like that, right?