Hobo With a Shotgun

Astonishingly inept and thoroughly unwatchable, Hobo With a Shotgun follows Rutger Hauer’s title character as he rolls into a corrupt small town and quickly begins doling out justice of an especially brutal variety. It’s a tongue-in-cheek premise that’s employed to consistently underwhelming effect by filmmaker Jason Eisener, as the director, working from a script by John Davies, has infused the proceedings with a relentlessly over-the-top sensibility that alienates the viewer virtually from the word go. Eisener’s aggressively broad modus operandi, reflected in everything from the unconscionably larger-than-life performances to the eye-bleedingly garish visuals to the desperately juvenile one-liners, ensures that Hobo With a Shotgun comes off as a pervasively amateurish work that feels as though it were slapped together over a weekend, with the movie’s complete and utter lack of positive attributes inevitably rendering Hauer’s surprisingly strong performance moot (ie unlike his incompetent costars, Hauer is actually attempting to create and sustain a fully-realized, three-dimensional character). By the time the unpleasant and typically overblown climax rolls around, Hobo With a Shotgun has undoubtedly established itself as one of the most objectionable and flat-out ugly films to come around in quite some time – with the movie’s unequivocal failure admittedly not all that surprising, given the similarly ineffective nature of the low-rent faux trailer that preceded it.

1/2* out of ****