The Untouchables

In spite of being released three decades ago, The Untouchablesⁱ could very well stand as the symbol, icon and étendard of present day US of A.

It's blessed with a very very expensive cast that fails to deliver enough acting to even pass first year undergraduate examinations. How could this be possible, you ask ? Bad management, I'm sure. The Connery-Costner relationship is markedly dysfunctional, perhaps a textbook example of such. De Niro never interacts with the rest of the crew, at all, and his part fails to make sense. At all. It's not that the actor fails to understand his part, it's just that there's nothing there to understand, and consequently there's nothing there to act. Much to the disbelief soon turned into chagrin of the US, it's perfectly possible to spend a lot of money for very little in the way of results. It happens every day, especially there.

It's built upon such bad writing I am not even sure I could do it justice. Take the humourless, stupid, pretentious, pointless edifice that today's United States are and imagine it were in fact a script. That'd be the script, pretty much.

Some highlights :

• The "hero" is simply stupid. It's not that he drinks or doesn't drink, that drugs are bad mmkay or we don't like their kind around here. It's not a matter of they tooker jerbz. It's just "the law", okay ? That is all, that is simply all. No room for more and no need for more in the friendly potted plant cum chewing gum chewer apparatus.
• The first scene consists of the stupid "hero" fucking up, on a grand, massive scale. The humour of his idiocy is not apparent to him, and this impervyⁱⁱ is quite apparent to everyone around him. They still inexplicably refrain from mushing him into a pulp. Perhaps it's also the law, "you shall not splatten humorless dimwits". Pretty stupid laws they got in the US, did you notice ?
• The very next scene is a very inept Colleen Badeⁱⁱⁱ telling the man that enforces the marauding stupidity that claimed the life of her innocent five year old daughter how she hopes he'll manage to cause even more trouble for honest, hard working people everywhere. It's not even that she sucks at acting in the way a stripper or a stand-up comedian sucks at acting, which is to say through badly formed habit pushing them into ridiculous excess. No, she simply sucks at acting in the way seventeen year old southern belles suck at acting : by utterly failing to act. You see her talking to Costner as a mourning mother, you get the impression she's hitting on him. It's not that her script is simply bad, either. It's not just bad, it's completely orthogonal to any sort of sense. You see that play out you think this must be somehow Obama related. There's just nothing else quite equally divorced from any semblance of reality or credibility.
• They go on horseback. For absolutely no conceivable or apparent reason, they just go on horseback. Because horses are cool, right ? Let alone the fact that it's painfully obvious the men can't handle horses and the horses are being scared and bothered by the experience. Let alone that the "bad guys" somehow magically act stupid to match the "cool" stupidity of the "heroes", rather than just getting into their cars and mowing 'em down. Let alone anything and everything : horseback! Because cowboys are cool! And Kevin Costner!!1

I made it as far as the bridge scene, at which point the deluge of pompous, illiterate, nonsensical and downright offensive braindamaged pointless soundbytes pouring out of Connery finally turned my stomach. Notice that I got five hundred words through this without even mentioning how fucking retarded Sean Connery is in this film. I have a little private joke going with some people where we do the "Come see me and Catherine Zeta Jones" in his commercial voice just to poke fun at his slippery as an eel self. This ruined that, it's not even funny anymore.

Much like today's United States, it's too stupid to even make fun of anymore. The end.

PS. The Untouchables is what you call that Indian caste of people who live outside of civilised society because they're just too scummy. It works admirably well as a title for both this film and the country it has meanwhile come to represent. They're The Untouchables.

1. 1987, by Brian De Palma, with Robert De Niro, Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, Andy Garcia. [↩]
2. Since impervious is an adjective and imperviousness is a little too... in line with the idiocy of the writers of this piece of garbage. [↩]
3. You never heard of her, she's not an actress, she's a producer's warm taco. [↩]