Critics reviews

These are all just movies, and often stupid ones at that. But sometimes, schlock has a way of bringing things to the surface that more respectable fare is afraid to touch. Maybe that’s why, ultimately, the empowered nihilism of Assassination Nation’s finale, as consciously silly as it is — with the girls all decked out in the costumes of a Japanese cult action movie — feels more cathartic, even emotionally honest.

In a manner most redolent of Angela Nagle’s sneering, sensationalist writings in Kill All Normies (2017), Assassination Nation depends excessively on contemporary colloquialisms and shock statements for a cheap thrill, a cheap thrill masquerading as critique.

Though this is partially the point of Assassination Nation, this “attitude” becomes wearying, as the film is a relentless torrent of preachy stimulation.

Levinson pushes dystopia, the boilerplate gimmick of superficial filmmakers, to extremes. It should be absurdist or satirical yet ends up monumentally crude.

At its best, it’s a funny but still morally keyed-in exploitation movie, capably toeing the line between outright classlessness and high-minded, politicized thrills.

The more that Assassination Nation tries to be about everything—hysteria, hypocrisy, media hypnosis and, of course, Donald Trump—it sacrifices precious specificities of character and context.

Energetically lurid, gratuitously violent and a hell of a lot of fun, horror-satire Assassination Nation is a throwback to black-comedy teen flicks of yore, but with a bitingly timely feel.