Pups Movie Review

We're back into the land of the old ultraviolence. The year is not 1979, its 1999. The antihero no longer listens to Beethoven's 9th, he listens to Kurt Loder on MTV. And when Stevie's (Cameron Van Hoy) MTV-generation mind finds his mothers gun and ends up staging his own Dog Day Afternoon with Rockie (Mischa Barton), his like-aged 12-year-old girlfriend, we end up with a film that is utterly funny, somewhat saturated with message, and weak in all other aspects.

Pups is the film in question, and it experienced a 48-hour theatrical release prior to the Columbine massacre. Pulled as soon as that debacle occured, it now makes the festival circuit... far from the indie house where it belongs. To get a sense of this bizarre film, insert the cliche of every hostage-crisis movie you've seen (Airheads and The Negotiator notwithstanding), then insert two youths making crazy demands, a pot-smoking hostage, a Gulf-War vet that the kids just tell to shut up as he spouts rhetoric on the cause of violent children, an old man who constantly tries to sneak out on his cane, and three bank tellers with abosolutely no intelligence between them, and then you have a good degree of humor in a weak film.

Why is the film so weak? Simple. On the textbook, the performances suck, the dialogue is five times more intelligent than what kids would be saying at that age (and the dialogue is also designed to make the kids look naive), and we want the political-agenda Gulf-War vet to shut up just as much as the children do. Yet the film perseveres, mainly due to music-video director Ash, who is able to actually manage to make an hour and a half long music video without resorting to heavy-metaphor and classical music (see Dolphins).

So it's, like, fun. So shut up and go see it.