Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

I liked Machete. It was silly and over-the-top but what were people expecting from a film where Danny Trejo goes around hacking people into bits with a machete? So, I was looking forward to Hobo with a Shotgun as well. The story couldn't be any simpler - hobo sees injustice, takes a shotgun, shoots people with it.

With a premise that simple, how did they manage to swing and miss? Don't get me wrong, I knew what to expect and I mentally lowered the bar before I watched it, but it still somehow couldn't clear it. I like b-movies and schlocky, cheap, gory horror and exploitation films, but Hobo was just... boring.

Machete was 1 hour 46 and yet it skipped along nicely, but Hobo, despite being a full 20 minutes shorter, really seemed to drag. I found myself checking to see how long was left after only 45 minutes, which is never a good sign. Somehow, a film about a hobo shooting bad guys with a shotgun just isn't as much fun as it could be. John Davies and Jason Eisner made a fun trailer, but for some reason they weren't able to translate that into a full feature. The replacing of David Brunt with Rutger Hauer is a good move and Hauer growls and grumbles throughout (sometimes so much so that I had no idea what he was saying) but the cameos that really spiced up Machete (Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan, Steven Seagal, Tom Savini, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin and others) are sadly lacking in Hobo.

It's suitably gory but completely directionless and often dull. For the half an hour before the hobo picks up his shotgun we have to sit through scenes with the bad guy (Brian Downey) and his two sons as they terrorize the city with their sunglasses and 80s costumes and get introduced to the Hooker With a Heart of Gold character (Molly Dunsworth). Yawn. Even when the hobo begins his rampage we have to suffer more of them. Get rid of them and give us more of the crooked cops! By the time The Plague turn up on the hour mark I was checking the time once every five minutes. I have no idea where the idea for The Plague came from but it's as stupid as their costumes. Somebody should have told them that scrap metal armour went out with Ned Kelly. Then comes the big finale, or, more accurately, the big let down. Unfortunately, the film's faults don't stop there. The constant erratic palette changes see the film move from deep red to green to dark blue to blood red to blue to red again to yellow. It's jarring and obnoxious and really fucking annoying. Finally, Hauer aside, the acting is really weak and the script isn't much better. It's a shame because it's a complete waste of one of the best trailers from Grindhouse.

Ultimately, it's a very scattergun effort from Davies and Eisner. Hauer's good, there's some half-decent gore and the torching of a school bus full of children to "Burn Baby Burn" is worth seeing but the rest is mediocre at best.

5 out of 10.