Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'AGGRO DR1FT' - A moronic and empty provocation
Despite my dislike for films which think it’s cool to replace title letters with numbers - Se7en being the exemption to that rule - this strange looking hitman film shot in infrared with rapper Travis Scott attached to the project initially looked intriguing.
Plus, AGGRO DR1FT is the first film from a new production company helmed by director Harmony Korine, the provocateur behind films like Gummo, Trash Humpers and Spring Breakers. Acquired tastes, sure, but envelope-pushing in their own ways.
Then came the screening.
Oh boy, the screening. It came.
The kindest descriptive is that it’s an uncompromisingly experimental film, and that’s always something to celebrate. It’s about a seasoned Floridian hitman (Jordi Mollà) who endlessly monologues about how he’s “the world’s greatest assassin”, a self-proclaimed “solitary hero” tasked with killing a (literal) demonic crime lord. The fairest assessment, however, is that it’s an interminably long 80 minutes of nothing, a meaningless provocation with enough empty musings about how “the old world is no more - no more time, no more truths” that will make any sane person want to yell “Sweet screaming Jesus on a Ferris wheel, why??” while debating whether dancing barefoot on a bed of pissed off scorpions might be preferrable to anything more Korine and his new venture have to offer.
I should have known. The signs were there. That new production company I mentioned... It’s a multidisciplinary, multimedia outfit called EDGLRD.
Yep.
Korine states in the press notes: “Wasn’t wanting to make a movie. Was wanting to make what comes after movies.”
This isn’t what comes after movies. It’s an adolescent prank, a frequently misogynistic trash fire that reaches Himalayan heights of stupidity and duuuuuude-levels of horniness when countless bikiniclad women shake their tits and arses around men over the repeated demonic voiceover of: “YEAH! DANCE BITCHES, DANCE BITCHES! OH YEAH, URGH! DANCE BITCHES, DANCE!”
Korine continued: “More like a video game. But who’s playing who. GAMECORE. EDGLRD”
You’re playing us, as your Grand Theft Auto rip-off doesn’t further the conversation around how conventional cinema can be pushed to further limits, or how the medium of film has been gamified. All it’s good for - at a push - is for background screenings in strip joints.
Oh, that’s where they’ve launched it in the US? The Los Angeles premiere of AGGRO DR1FT was at the Crazy Girls strip club just off Sunset Boulevard? Well, more fool me - there may be some selfawareness at play here after all... The director finished describing his curled-out newbie thusly: “Life is good. Without it we’d be dead. AGGRO DR1FT. In between worlds. Locked and loaded. An ode to the aggressive drifter.”
You’re right, Mr. Korine. Without life, we would be dead.
Thank you, sensei, you’ve touched me deeply.
However, life is far from good after after watching AGGRO DR1FT. It’s the opposite of good, in fact, and I don’t plan on wasting any more of mine writing about a film so desperately yearning to be edgy and “anti-Hollywood” that it swings into vapid, moronic guff. Whether intentionally repugnant or misunderstood in its irony, it really doesn’t matter. Unless you want to watch what happens to an aging provocateur desperately trying to get with the kids and whining about how he’s disillusioned with movies through his ludicrously named new company, you do well to avoid this one like the plague. AGGRO DR1FT is not an ode to the aggressive drifter; rather, an ode to a tragic midlife crisis.
AGGRO DR1FT is out now. Please don't.