There's a deep class difference between the two couples - between Brian, with his yuppie sportswear, and Early, with his greasy hair and careless tattoos and smelly socks. And between the feminist Carrie, and Adele, who observes curiously, "I used to smoke, but Early broke me of it." The yuppies, though, with their liberals' reluctance to show bad manners, try to "accept" these two strangers and to make allowances for their behavior.
A certain bond even grows between Brian and Early. Brian, for example, has never fired a gun. Early has. Brian is fascinated by Early's gun (Carrie is terrified). Early lets him shoot out some windows in an abandoned factory, and Brian is like a kid with a toy.
It's also exciting - a rush, a high - when the two guys go out drinking one night, and when a guy in the bar takes offense to Brian's appearance, Early steps in and kicks the guy almost to death.
Early is not stupid, and has a better sense of Brian than Brian has of him. As Carrie gradually discovers that Early beats Adele and is probably a sociopath, Brian is being halfway seduced by Early's lawlessness. Not that he wants to get involved, of course.
But it's intriguing to be so close to it.
Gradually, by slow, logical steps, the director Dominic Sena and the writer Tim Metcalfe reveal to Brian and Carrie the full reality of the situation they've gotten themselves into. Here's a middle-class couple who thought it would be a gas to revisit the scenes of mass murders, and whaddaya know? They end up with a real mass murderer, right in the same car, and it isn't fun. Not at all.
Dominic Sena is a director unknown to me, but he shows the kind of mastery of material here that I've seen in other early films such as Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets," Terence Malick's "Badlands," John McNaughton's "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" and Carl Franklin's "One False Move." The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message.
A woman sitting behind me at the screening objected out loud, from time to time, to the movie's "depravity." If she hates it so much, I wondered, why doesn't she leave? Afterwards, she admitted it was "very well-made," but that she feared "the wrong people could see it and get bad ideas." I think the point of "Kalifornia" is that it's altogether too comforting to believe that people need inspiration to hurt and kill. Some people, the movie says, are simply evil.
They lack all values and sympathy. And they don't need anybody to give them ideas.
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