"Blue Ruin was my favorite film of the year and I'll tell you why – it's a perfect antidote. I am goddamn sick and tired of revenge being easy and automatic. I'm tired of slick thrillers populated with nothing but tough guys that only say cool shit. It's boring. Boooooring. Those movies are written by and for guys who spend a lot of time making muscles in their bathroom mirrors. I'm glad Liam Neeson is working, but Blue Ruin and I are here to tell you that that's not how the deal goes down.
"How it goes down is clumsy. How it goes down is poorly thought out. How it goes down is always bad. For everyone. Jeremy Saulnier's second feature gets all of this sickeningly right. Macon Blair is wonderfully sympathetic as Dwight, a young man adrift since the murder of his parents. His grief drives him to commit an act of vengeance that is as fatal as it is inept. Mistake piles upon mistake and, as these things often do, it all takes on its own hideous momentum. It's grim and blackly comic and, as weird as it is to say about a film in which multiple families are destroyed, downright refreshing in its honesty. That is where it is head and shoulders above your run-of-the-mill revenge thriller. It tells you the truth all the way down the line. Traumatized drifters don't make great assassins. There are no winners here. There is nothing glamorous about the swath of damage left in Dwight's fumbling wake, but that doesn't keep you from feeling for him, even rooting for him. That's a testament to Blair's performance. There's not a false or wasted note in it. The film is an economical marvel - no fat, all lean - and it is a thing of dark beauty.
"Don't let those other movies fool you. You never get even. The scales are never balanced. The keys are in the car." ~ Cole Roulain
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