The Doom Generation (2023)

Great Film overall

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Doom Generation is a pretentious brain dead road movie that takes style over substance to a whole new level. Amy and Jordan are young losers whose lives are a destructive blur of junk food, swearing and killing. These two losers are joined by hipster drifter Xavier whose appearance in the film seems to be an attempt to prove that being bisexual is somehow automatically cool. He isn't. He is boring and so is this film. There are much better 1990s road movies like Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia and Flirting With Disaster to name a few.

This stunning piece elicits emotions that in my case were so intense that I submitted myself to the harrowing experience of the registration process just to be able to share with the world that I throw up more colourful ideas after a bad paella and a bottle of cheap lambrusco. I white-knuckled it on fast forward and it still dragged like a 45 minute tooth extraction; waxing your armpits hurts less. Whoever participated in churning out this steaming pile of manure should be sent to a pig farm for a lifetime of unpaid work. Pointless, clueless, plot less. No script, no dialogue, no direction. It makes you think though - who stole the money to finance it, who blackmailed the actors to take part in it, who browbeat a family member to shoot it, so yeah, it is thought provoking. My neighbour's cat suffering from chronic diarrhoea excretes stuff that has more substance to it. To top it off this drivel looks like it has been recorded on a point-and-shoot pocket camera bought at a country fair in eastern Europe. IMDb really has to introduce new ratings system, maybe minus points, so that pieces like the doom generation can get its undeniable praise.

There is more depth and thought to this movie than first meets the eye but the Doom Generation unfortunately falls to the ills of poor acting, poor screen writing, and major gaps and holes in the storyline. The first half of the movie, aside from setting up the storyline, is almost a waste of time.Still, the movie is an interesting study in the dark thought and actions of 3 teens on a road trip to hell finding elicit drugs, sex, and violence just at about every stop over. Amy and Jordan are two X Generation punk rockers best described as Stoned most of the time and looking for excitement. They picked up an older but even more-so on the edge low life named X or Xavier who was running from the 'Skin-heads'. As the movie goes along, the depth of depravity increases until Jordan who I find is the most redeemable character being the most harmless starts asking the question 'Is there any meaning in life'.Still I enjoyed some of the thought especially towards the end of the movie. There are some themes around redemption and salvation that I find interesting. There is a lot of sex in this movie of which while I found provocative in the beginning, a major turn off towards the end of the movie where especially for Amy and X, there was nothing sacred in sex. At the conclusion of the movie, Jordan it seemed was the redeemable character as he confesses his love for Amy. And, for those who are squeamish, avoid the ending at all costs. I found it a bit unnecessary and the ending scene in the car almost pointless.

I don't object to the sex or violence, or even the characters' reactions to the situations they find themselves in. What bothers me is I get the sense that the story(?) is secondary to Araki's attempt to have The Doom Generation create the same iconic cultural buzz that Pulp Fiction did the year previous. It's obvious so much time and energy was spent perfecting the crazy/sexy/cool look and feel of the movie, that the story, acting and the (cringe-inducing)dialog were duly sacrificed to achieve some kind of pop culture statement. The problem is that Araki's commentary on the younger generation was so exaggerated and trite it turned me right off and muted any semblance of plot or characterization that remained. Araki comes off like someone who has very little inherit understanding of the generation he's trying to be the mouthpiece for. Xavier licks ejaculate off of his hand, but the only reason why it exists is to 'freak out the hetero squares'. The film bursts at the seams with content that exists only to shock. The trouble is, it has a hard time even doing that.The truly sad thing is, this movie was not without potential. The premise was interesting, the look was good, but if we were given just one more good element, it might have been a watchable film. As it stands, the movie spins its wheels in the mud -- making a lot of commotion, but ultimately never going anywhere. The dialog, I'm convinced, was written solely with the purpose that at least one of the put-downs or sarcastic comebacks would somehow become a popular catchphrase amongst the hip gen-x crowd. Same with the 666 thing. That kind of gimmickry might accentuate a good film, but it also makes a bad film worse, because it comes across as pretentious and self-serving.As a film about the generation of which I'm a member (I was nineteen when this came out), I don't know if I should feel insulted or embarrassed for Araki. One thing's for sure, he should be embarrassed about making this sleazy schlock.