I watched a movie on Prime and it made me angry and it’s been three days and I’m still angry so I’m gonna unload.
The movie is called DOE. And at the end I was like Homer saying “D’oh!” except with way more profanity because the screenwriter / director totally explosive diarrhea-ed the bed on a major plot point. If you plan to watch this movie, spoiler warning: The ending sucked so hard I’m gonna ruin the whole fucking thing and just tell you what happened. My recommendation is to skip this steaming pile and read my review instead, along with an easy description of how he could have made the movie, well, probably not awesome, but at least pretty good.
Okay so this guy wakes up in a park and has zero memory. One thing he can do though is speak a lot of languages. Publicly, he tells people he can speak 37, but in reality, he speaks hundreds. He didn’t want to tell anyone he could speak hundreds because he decided that would be too weird, so he pulled 37 out of his ass.
He’s a white dude, and the Black cop who found him and tried to help him figure out who he was becomes his best friend. They don’t have any luck on discovering his past (until later) and the guy marries his best friend’s sister (who is also Black—that’s relevant) and together they have a child. This is all back-filled information, by the way. It takes place in the “present”, which is eight years after he initially woke up.
So far, no tirade. Tirade is coming. Bide.
The movie is pretty low budget and stars no one anyone knows, but sometimes those movies are good and this one had me into it right up until the end, which is why I’m so pissed. Where shit starts to go off the rails for this guy (who chose the first name of John, but at least didn’t pick Doe for a last name) is when another guy, acting crazy as fuck, shows up in his life saying he woke up eight years ago too and also has cool as shit mega mind powers, except his are all about math.
Anyway, dude is acting crazy and John’s wife says stay away from that crazy dude and John says okay but he lied and goes to see him in his shitty motel room and crazy dude blows his brains out (reason why happens later) and John takes his math notebook to a math prof and the math prof says holy fucking shit this is some serious math, dude was a genius.
I’m digging this. Are you? It gets better, but then it gets way worse.
In the book he learns that there were like three or four other dudes who were all the same, but all different. They all woke up eight years ago, no memory of shit, but with a special mind power: art, music, that kind of shit. Also, they’re all recently dead from suicide.
Oh, foreshadowing . . .
At this point, you know there is no happy ending for John. You know he’s gonna die. But when he does finally die the movie has be fucking ruined and you kind of want to celebrate.
John, despite his wife saying stop this bullshit, keeps doing that bullshit. He is in the bathroom of a bar and it has a black light in there for some really fucked up reason because who the hell wants to see what a black light reveals in the bathroom of a place where people consume lots of alcohol? Anyway, the light reveals a cross on his hand. So he buys a black light and goes home and takes off his shirt and discovers . . . Nazi shit! Fucking Nazi tattoos all over. And his best friend and wife are Black so that’s extra bad.
His best friend is no longer a cop but a private detective. He shows him and his friend is understandably pissed and tells John to drop it. John won’t drop it so they road trip using the tattoos as a guide. John’s friend was a badass cop, and he beats the shit out of some Nazi biker to get some info. At that point it would have been cool if they showed John had some Bourne Identity kind of ass-kicking powers, but he just stands back all meek and let’s his buddy do the beat down. Him not being one for violence is in line with the plot, I guess, but I would have been able to forgive it just for the “Oh, he speaks a bunch of languages and he kicks ass? Cool!”
Okay let’s wrap this shit up. Turns out he and all the other memory wipe but know lots about one thing dudes were all sentenced to be executed because they did really bad shit, and this mega evil corporation paid off the wardens to fake the executions so they could use these guys for their experiments. John really was an evil Nazi fucknugget who murdered a family of Black people. Oh, shit. I almost forgot. They telegraph the fact that these guys are gonna die by suicide with fainting spells and nosebleeds and shit. John was starting to get those. If you don’t know he has to die by the end of the movie at this point, you stupid.
So, what really pissed me off? It was something that happened in a matter of seconds and would have been so easy to fix and also been a cool explanation. John, and the rest, have been having this dream about holding some rabbit. Then the dream comes where they rip the rabbit apart and they cry over it or some shit. It is alluded to that this was part of their “training” by the mega evil corporation to make these guys stop being violent murderers and instead become peaceful. Because the other guys we learn about also became nice and gentle family men, so it worked.
John finds his way to the mega evil corporation and gets a meeting with CEO lady. She explains the reason everyone kills themselves is because they are still experimenting, and he was a beta version and after eight years they started to revert to being bad, so they built in a self-termination failsafe kind of like Bladerunner. Okay, that’s a little weak, but I’ll allow it. What happened next, I won’t allow.
He asks her straight up: What’s with the special powers? She says it was just a surprise bonus.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? YOU JUST RUINED THE WHOLE FUCKING MOVIE!
Someone doesn’t learn hundreds of fucking languages without being exposed to them. Your little hey murder this rabbit and cry over it conditioning isn’t going to teach him to speak Punjabi, for fuck’s sake. No one learns Sioux in a fucking vacuum, dammit! Same goes for the guy knowing a bunch of math formulas or how to play the fucking bagpipes.
And it was so easy to fix. It would have been a far cooler explanation than “I dunno; shit happens” and I came up with it in seconds amidst the fog of anger of how shitty that brief, movie-ruining scene was.
Here is what she should have said, according to James Fell, budding screenwriter: “Your mind was filled with hate; it was your identity, your entire memory. We couldn’t erase that, we had to replace it. The technique we used to reprogram you involved pushing everything that was you by overloading your mind with new information. For the others we chose math, music, and art. For you, we used languages.”
THAT would have cool. But no, she just said beats the shit out of me why you can speak Mongolian.
Fuck this movie. When John jumped off the building at the end I said, “Good.” If you happen to know the screenwriter / director, tell him I said he’s a dick.
I have a new movie review out that is a similar wow this is such a piece of shit tirade about Hugh Jackman’s latest effort. Read it here (you’ll need to subscribe).
Haha while I like your suggestion better, when you explained they were experiments I just assume that instead of just the experiment to remove the hate and violence they experimented with some forms of learning things quickly and chose to do a different experiment on each of their minds to see how that went as well. So I don’t think the bed was completely shat in, but a dutch oven did occur…