Blue Ruin

I will never forget the first time I cried in the theater; it was when a local gang retaliated in response to Ice Cube pulling out a gun on them in Boyz in the Hood. When I saw them shoot down poor Ricky in the alley, I just lost it! It was so pathetic that even my female cousin looked at me in disgust as it was happening. But whatever, I wasn't the only one crying, quite a few people felt this connection to Ricky!  I grew up nowhere near the hood but just like Ricky I was trying to escape the awful environment I grew up in; which was the horrible country town of Victoria, TX. There may not have been black dudes who had Jeri curls and drank St Ides but there were plenty of hicks who all owned rifles and listened to David Allen Coe. So when he went down, I felt my dreams going down with him as well. "Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood!" That's right Ice Cube, and apparently they don't care about what's going on in the woods either.

Jeremy Saulnier in Blue Ruin takes you to a world where people dispense their own form of justice on one another. And just like in Boyz in the Hood, there seems to be no end to the retaliation that occurs as a result of it. When you first meet Dwight, you see this loner who lives out of his car, eats out of garbage bins, and showers in the homes of people on vacation. It isn't until one morning when he receives an important message from a cop that he decides to clean himself up and go on what is apparently his life's mission. The man that was accused of murdering his parents is about to be released from prison and Dwight immediately returns home to kill him. Once he does, it sets in motion a series of events where Dwight is left no other option but to defend his family and take on the entire family of the man he just murdered.

What I like about this film is how real life revenge is portrayed in it. Dwight's parents were taken away from him at a young age for apparently no reason and the murderer is being released early due to a plea agreement. Now I am not saying that we would all go after our parents' murderers nor am I saying that we should; but if we did, we would be just as bad at it as Dwight is. He is so inept at what he is doing that it's painful to watch at times but you can tell that he will avenge his parent's death no matter what the likely outcome of it is. He hasn't gone away to study jiu-jitsu with random monks in Brazil and returned as this badass. He simply went away to deal with the pain and this is the result of his time of reflection.

You feel the fear he has over his sister and her kids potentially being harmed as a result of his actions, the built up anger he has in his heart, as well as his inability to identify with a world that's full of people who haven't had their lives turned upside down in the manner that he and his family have. But also when you get to the third act of the movie and it slows down a bit, you learn more about Dwight and you begin to identify with him in a different way.

At first I didn't quite know how I felt about this film when I left the theater. I thought it was entertaining but it felt more like a cry for gun control. "This is what happens when you give a bunch of hicks easy access to guns" And while it still sort of has that feel to it, this movie has settled well with me mainly because of its realism and the range of emotions it forces you to feel. I rate this movie as FRESH mainly due to the fact that they were able to find a bar that still sells Red Dawg beer! I haven't had that since I was in grade school!