When most people think of Vinnie Jones, "decent actor" probably isn't one of the first phrases to come to mind. "Footballer"; "professional thug"; "a block of teak" (that last one was from Nick). But since his first film appearance in 1998 in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you can't deny that he's had a prolific film career. Even spawned a meme or two surrounding his identity as declared to unruly females. But it still might come as a surprise to people to hear that, in The Midnight Meat Train, he's not actually that bad at all. Granted, this might well be because he speaks a grand total of three words in the entire film, but small steps...
Leon is a photographer living in New York and struggling to capture "the true face of the city" in his photos. When he happens upon a young woman being harassed in the subway late at night he manages to both intervene and get the photos he needs, but when he later discovers that the woman is missing and that he was one of the last persons to see her he becomes obsessed with what happened there, and with the mysterious man he saw at the same time. This man, Mahogany, is in fact a serial killer stalking the subway trains late at night for his victims, and as Leon's obsession with him grows he finds himself being drawn more and more into this life, even as he also finds himself changing in subtle and strange ways.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't Vinnie Jones that first drew me to The Midnight Meat Train, but the names Clive Barker and Ryûhei Kitamura. The former, of course, is the artist, writer and director behind so many great works including Hellraiser and Nightbreed; the latter is the director of another of my favourite films of all time, Versus. Once I heard those two names were involved, I was more or less hopelessly hooked in. But did it live up to all my anticipation?
Well, Kitamura's direction certainly shines through in the film, particularly in the fight and gore scenes (and most of them blend together as the film goes along). I've said before that I'm not a gorehound, but there's a certain beauty to the way Kitamura shoots these scenes that makes them compelling viewing, no matter how visceral - much like the "hammer ballet" scene from Oldboy. If anyone can make an eyeball popping out of Ted Raimi's face (oh yeah, Ted Raimi has a cameo and, as is to be expected, dies gruesomely) look gorgeous, it's Kitamura. Amusingly though, the scene that makes me squirm in my seat isn't any of the gore-soaked ones, but a scene in which Mahogany does some self-surgery on himself to remove some sort of growth on his chest (so you might want to watch out for that and be ready to look away if you're anything like me).
The story is a little more wobbly, although it makes more and more sense as the film goes on. The original short story that the movie is based on was only 20 pages long, and so at times the plot seems a little stretched thin over the 99 minutes of movie. It does, however, have many of the "signature" Clive Barker trademarks; an artist in one of the main roles (and in the gallery scenes much of the art on display is Barker's own works); a hidden world existing secretly alongside ours; and our protagonist Leon going to some very dark places as he pursues his obsession through the film are the ones that stand out the most.
The ending - if you'll excuse a bit of a spoiler here - is quite downbeat, and I know that lately we've been on a bit of a rage against downbeat endings on this blog (looking at you, The Mist), but the difference between the ending of The Midnight Meat Train and the ending of The Mist is that the former's ending makes sense within the context of the story, while in the latter it just comes out of nowhere and kicks you somewhere soft. If your film is to have a downbeat ending, that's the way it should really be done (in my humble opinion at least); a kind of horrific inevitability rather than something that comes out of nowhere to shock you.
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