Postal is the latest from the notorious Dr. Uwe Boll, who is by
reputation the film industry's greatest financial wizard and worst
director. He has an uncanny ability to raise vast sums of money for his
films by exploiting tax loopholes, investment shelters, and the incentives
posted by national film boards. Unfortunately, most people feel that Dr.
Boll, like Dr. Frankenstein, uses his genius for evil instead of good. He
uses that money to make films adapted from video games. Those movies
have been consistently and predictably despised by those who hate the very
idea of films being made from video games, but they are also reviled by
the fans of the games. That makes Boll-bashing one of the few things that
critics and fanboys can always agree upon. Dr. Boll has never scored a
perfect zero at Rotten Tomatoes, a site which evaluates how many critics like a
given movie, but his adaptation of Alone in the Dark came heartbreakingly
close with a positive review score of 1%, and no Boll movie has ever received more than
11% positive reviews from the critics. On the fanboy side, three of Boll's
films are rated in the all-time bottom 100 at IMDb, which is the ultimate
fanboy barometer. (Three other Uwe Boll films are very close to that
IMDb list!)
His previous video game adaptations have either been horror/splatter
films or sword and sorcery epics, and have taken themselves reasonably
seriously. Postal is (loosely) based on a game, but is a whole 'nother
kettle of crawdads. It is a raunchy, offensive, lowbrow comedy which
deliberately flouts as many taboos as possible. It begins, for example,
with a comic scene in which the 9/11 hijackers are debating whether there
are enough virgins in paradise to make martyrdom worthwhile. Just as they
decide to abandon the whole jihad thing and fly to the Bahamas, the
American passengers use brute force to storm through the cockpit door to
take back the plane. Unfortunately, the passengers do not believe the
hijackers about the new flight plan, and the ensuing struggle for the
controls causes the plane to veer into the World Trade Center.
That gives you the idea. The film is as tasteless and politically
incorrect as possible, and deliberately so, even when there are no laughs
to mine. The transgressive subject matter is designed to promote itself
with controversy. Boll, who co-wrote the script, ridicules Americans,
Germans, religion, Moslems, the handicapped, dwarfs, big business, and
even himself (he has a small role, playing himself). The entire film is an
in-your-face act of provocation. When it is not insulting people, it is
indulging in crass displays of bodily functions like bowel movements and
sex acts involving morbidly obese people. All of it is presented with as
much nudity, violence and foul language as is possible in the film's
context.
Context?
Yes, it does have a plot, of sorts. A down-and-out trailer park denizen
and his uncle, the leader of a bogus religious cult, conspire to end their
financial woes by hijacking a shipment of the hottest toys on the American
market: the Crotchy Dolls. (Don't ask.) Unfortunately, the
Taliban have hatched a parallel scheme to use the same dolls to distribute
an incurable disease throughout America. The two groups compete for the
booty, while various crazy Americans attempt to prevent both groups from
achieving their goals.
The film isn't as bad as you might expect from Dr. Boll. Of the films
Boll has made since 2003, Postal rates the highest at Rotten Tomatoes. 9%
of the reviews were positive - more than double Boll's previous high
rating in that period, which was 4%. Not only is it an upgrade for him,
but I think that the 9% score is actually a hair low
and probably includes some built-in anti-Boll prejudice. I'd say that
Postal is a better movie than the directly comparable Love Guru, for
example, which drew about 14% positive reviews. Boll has a sense of
humor, and the film does deliver some laughs, especially when it features
the guy who plays bin Laden (Seinfeld's "soup Nazi"). Boll is a smart man
and some of the ideas are damned clever, like a scene with bin Laden
attending a presentation by one of those motivational speakers, taking
diligent notes, and trying to buy the books until his credit card is
rejected - all of which reminded me of the humor in the early Woody Allen
comedies like Bananas.
Where Postal stops short of being a really good film is in the
execution and timing. Many scenes go on long after the joke has been
exhausted, and every single scene is lacking in subtlety. Sometimes that
sledgehammer approach to comedy can be brutally and blackly effective, as
in the pre-credits 9/11 scene described above, but most of the time it's
just kind of offensive without really being funny. I don't really need to spend much time watching a
stark naked Dave Foley take a public dump while he discusses his finances
with his top advisor, who grimaces at the sights and smells of Dave's
unsavory excretion ritual. If the joke had been a throwaway, it could have
been funny, but prolonging it morphed it from disgustingly funny to just
plain disgusting, and the hammy advisor was allowed to play directly to
the camera with enough exaggerated facial expressions to embarrass Zero Mostel.
