Game Over

Postal Directed by Uwe Boll

Like a demented child’s fantasy, Uwe Boll’s Postal fails to comprehend its own corrupt nature. I don’t fully understand or care about the German émigré’s brash confrontations with critics and the hatred leveled against his filmmaking (a petition to get him to retire has been circulating the web in the last few weeks), but the problem with Boll’s latest videogame adaptation for the big screen has less to do with his admittedly crappy direction than its indolent treatment of pertinent ideas.

Based on the mindlessly violent series of first-person shooters, Postal contains the same intensely farcical bloodshed—including aimless shootouts between Islamic terrorists and American anybodies and scenes of children getting shot point-blank—but it’s Boll’s knuckleheaded misinterpretation of topical humor that really gets me. Injecting gross stereotypes of post-9/11 rage without settling on a single cogent idea, the movie propagandizes cross-cultural animosity. “If you were in a box,” one character asks, “how would you think outside it?” Indeed.

Stuffing the current state of global affairs into a cinematic punchline sometimes leads to the compelling satire of an editorial cartoon. Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay places its credible protagonists in a universe of misadventures dictated by contemporary headlines; in a somewhat more irreverent vein, Lloyd Kaufman’s newly released raunchfest, Poultrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken Dead, shows hooded birds in Photoshopped Abu Ghraib prison photos.

Postal never manages to get that pointed. In between aimless, unfunny lewdness (including an extended scene of male exposure far more discomfiting than the now-notorious Forgetting Sarah Marshall moment) lies a flat and uninteresting story with modern references littered throughout like boiling societal vomit: al-Qaida, lead by a jovial Osama bin Laden (Larry Thomas, once a Saddam Hussein impersonator on Arrested Development), plans to inject the Avian flu into American dolls, while a renegade hedonistic cult called the Denomination of Organic Monotheism (DOOM, naturally) tries to stop them. Through it all, a disillusioned everyman (Zack Ward) overcomes his loser stature through a series of escalating murders and anarchistic enlightenment, which somehow makes him the hero of the movie. Don’t ask. 

Anyway, the plot matters less than the disparate incidents: There’s a distinct meanness to the opening minutes, supposedly set on United Flight 93 in the Airplane! universe. Seven years after the fact, the brainless conceit of two terrorist pilots squabbling over the phone with bin Laden about the number of virgins waiting for them in heaven seems kinda stale. The brilliant South Park episode “Bin Laden Loves a Camel”—which pitted a Bugs Bunny-fied Cartman against bin Laden as Elmer Fudd—aired in November 2001, becoming one of the definitive satiric reactions to the attacks a few months earlier. Trey Parker and Matt Stone sent the Colorado kids to Afghanistan for an even-handed spoof of global confusion. “If I grew up here, I’d be pissed off too,” admits young Kyle. Later, the entire jihad against America gets blamed on bin Laden’s small-penis complex. In its riotous absurdity, the episode actually generated a sense of release.

In Postal, Boll wades through the same tired muck without bothering to analyze it. Witnessing bin Laden take a call from his pal in the White House (“What is it, Georgie?”) isn’t fresh or comedically inspired. If you can find something remotely clever about watching the two leaders skip hand-in-hand into a nuclear holocaust sunset, be my guest. The bland humor, however, isn’t as problematic as the way Boll disguises bigotry as exploitative tomfoolery: A black cop shoots a Korean woman in the face because he thinks she may have possibly used the n-word on him. A would-be Islamic suicide bomber roams the supermarket boding farewell to various snack foods. This just makes me consider the possibility that The Eternal Jew might have landed a free pass if Joseph Goebbels insisted it was harmless satire.

German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl spent half a lifetime insisting that she wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party and never endorsed its anti-Semitic conceits. Even if her statements are taken as sincere, the five films she directed for the Third Reich (Victory of Faith, Day of Freedom: Our Armed Forces, Triumph of the Will, Olympia Part 1 and Olympia Part 2) unquestionably glorify German Nazi ideals. In “Propaganda and the German Cinema,” author David Welch describes this as “the triumph of self-realization over the hegemony imposed by foreigners.”

Postal represents Boll’s own horrendous act of self-realization: It’s his ugly world, and we’re just spectators. He even has the gall to play himself in a scene that places him in a fistfight against the original Postal game developer. Strolling through his own tyrannical realm, Boll mistakes hostility for insight. His crass depiction of a civilization driven by madness and anger feels like the fever dream of a sociopath. Rather than mocking the absurdities of our time, Postal reflects them.