Frank (Joel Murray) hates his neighbours, listening to their inane whitterings through his paper thin apartment walls he fantasizes about taking a shotgun to them - and their baby - so he no longer has to hear them jabber on about pop culture. Similarly, he can't stand his co-workers, whose only form of communication seems to be giddily laughing at the cruelty perpetuated by reality television.

Frank does himself no favours, sat, practically a prisoner, in front of his television enduring a stream of ever worsening, ever cheaper and ever meaner programming that, to him, represents the moral decay of society. His major concern is not that people are dumbing down, but that people just aren't nice anymore.

When a display of consideration for a co-worker results in him being fired on the same day his doctor informs him he has a brain tumour, Frank decides to do something about one of the stroppy teenagers he sees on a trashy 16th Birthday tv-show. His first act of mayhem is witnessed by teenager Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr) who eventually joins Frank on his crusade to rid the world of people who aren't nice.

Bobcat Goldthwait's occasionally hilarious, but always pertinent, satire feels like a spiritual cousin to Mike Judge's Idiocracy; a film that predicted a futuristic America in which society, due to a steady diet of junk food and trash tv, had become dangerously dumbed down. It playfully has the audience laughing aloud and then twisting the view back on themselves, so that you question your own laughter and your own morals, especially as you start to root for Frank and Roxy in their undoubtedly homicidal campaign.

Whilst it may sound exploitational and mindlessly provocative, Goldthwait's real strength is to ground the film in an emotional reality whilst giving the more violent sequences an air of fantasy; especially during one very funny travelogue montage.

Primarily it is the complex relationship between Frank and Roxy that holds the film together. The idea that there may be some attraction between these two characters - Roxy a teenger and Frank in his fifties - is carefully batted away by Frank, but becomes a recurring issue throughout the feature, at the same time forcing the audience to ask questions of itself. Whilst there is much to relate to in the frustrations of both characters they are dealing with their problems in a murderous fashion, and the film is fully aware of its own provocativeness, it wants you to think and question and debate.

Frank pines, in the film's strongest diatribe, that people don't know how to have conversations anymore, the greatest strength of this film is that you will definitely, whether you like it or not, leave the theatre talking about it. A sharp, smart, funny polemic of our time.

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