Movie Review: Hobo with a Shotgun7 Comments

Jason Eisner's "Hobo with a Shotgun" hits theatres May 6

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the darkness near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Rutger Hauer’s last words as Roy Batty in Blade Runner are the high water mark of gold-plated movie bombast – near-gibberish delivered with such untouchable conviction that men have been known to wait a lifetime to deliver these lines in any situation they consider remotely appropriate. You just know the people who made Hobo With A Shotgun had them in mind when they placed Hauer, as the titular hobo, in front of a bunch of newborns in a maternity ward, and had him make a speech about how life is cruel and will beat you down but maybe, just maybe, you might end up as, you know, a hobo. With a shotgun. Like him.

It’s a long way from doves flying into the rainy night air on the roof of the Bradbury Hotel but, hey, we don’t make movies like that anymore, do we?

Jason Eisener’s film began as a trailer in Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse project, the same ‘70s exploitation movie love letter that produced last year’s Machete, the innovation this time around being that the Canadian government got to pay for a film where the heroine gets her throat sliced open with a hacksaw and the villain uses a homeless man as a piñata.

(For readers outside Canada, it has to be noted at this point that, unlike Hollywood, it’s government agencies, not movie studios, that ultimately produce films in this country. The result is taxpayer dollars used to make a film meant to pay tribute to movies that were once made with laundered mob money. Make your own wry aside here.)

Fans of the TV series Trailer Park Boys will get a thrill the moment they see Robb “Ricky” Wells dragged onscreen for the dubious honour of being entry one in the film’s body count; grindhouse cinema aficionados – and there are plenty out there – will happily tick off their checklist of exploitation movie musts: The hooker with a heart of gold played by an actress (Molly Dunsmore) far too pretty to be a streetwalker in the real world; the corrupt cops and their demonic chief of police; the evil sons of the crime boss villain, modeled here on Risky Business-era Tom Cruise; the frightened locals who turn on the heroic hobo; the polyester-scented nihilism that’s fermented deeply since it was poured out in the era of the oil crisis and Munich massacre.

Playing critic with a film like Hobo With A Shotgun is almost pointless, since it sets the bar so low from its point of inspiration that you’re forced to make up new criteria: Is the hobo using appropriate shotgun ammunition? Is that a reasonable splatter pattern for a head shot? Are the titles at the beginning and the credits at the end? The only fair shot you can make at the film is that it has a hard time taking itself seriously, and plays as parody probably more often than genre purists will likely appreciate.

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