Mash Ville is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
Mash Ville is the type of ensemble crime film that is so jam-packed with plotty incident and odd characters that it feels as though the film is doing a lot and thus must be doing something interesting and new. The film aspires to be something like an acid western, and it may also draw comparisons to Tarantino or the Coens, in that the film attempts to blend slick humor with farce with black comedy.
The problem with an overly plotted black comedy about death and crime is that, if you do too much, it becomes less of a fun romp and more of an unwieldy chore. With Mash Ville, we are given a plot with two too many elements being juggled. The film begins with a double homicide, which we later learn is committed by a pair of murderer cultists who are killing one person for each month of the year in order to initiate a ritual to stop the corruption that will be the ruination of the world.
Then, we have the moonshine vendors whose latest batch of whisky is making people keel over and die. There is also the prop department manager on a film shoot, who finds a dead body in her trunk and uses that as a prop mannequin for the film, and whose car later gets stolen by the moonshine vendors.
This is without mentioning the murderer’s row of ancillary characters that fade in and out of this over-stuffed thing – the crooked, maniacal cop; the weirdo liquor aficionado; a nervous man with a briefcase who comes in to explain the blood ritual to the audience (I must be honest, I lost track of where this guy came from); the woman in the trunk, who climbs in voluntarily for reasons that are never quite clear.
Mash Ville is a textbook lesson in how more is not always better. Despite so much going on, not much is being said here. In the rare moments where the film chooses to slow down and focus on character development, it feels out of place and mostly unearned. If I am to compare this to the work of the Coens at all, it is only to say that every character in this feels like the tenth lead of a Coens’ film. Everyone is a John Turturro, and I’m not talking Barton Fink. Turturro himself once tried to flesh out his character of “The Jesus” from The Big Lebowski. That didn’t pan out very well. This, too, fails to elevate its misfit bunch of characters above background status.
The olive branch I can extend is this. Hwang Wook constructs scenes very well. I enjoyed the framing and (most of) the lighting. Most of the outdoor scenes appear to be lit naturally, to good effect. There are moments of visual interest that transcend the bloat of the story. A humdrum standoff sequence, for instance, is shot through the narrow slit between two saloon doors.
These are minor visual treats in what is otherwise a tedious experience of senseless action-comedy spectacle. The film has the energy but not the substance.
Mash Ville: C
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
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