Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Chris Thornton, Jay Thornton
Starring: R. Michael Gull, Sam Koze, Chris Thornton
From what I can gather, the main attraction in becoming a racist,
homophobic, misogynist misanthrope is the absolution from personal
responsibility such a mindset promises. Can you imagine! You are the
beneficiary of an entrenched patriarchy, with a racial hegemony which
favours your skin colour, but yet you are still a little piece of shit
loser because your sense of entitlement far exceeds your application
towards achieving it. This wasn’t meant to happen! Be nice to blame
somebody else for your misfortune, wouldn’t it? Someone different. Not the
loaded political system which has seen the "gap between the rich and poor
is at its highest level in decades" in advanced economies (according to a
report by the International Monetary Fund). Nah, it’s the fault of people
with different eumelanin levels. Women, they’re to blame too. And The
Gays, somehow.
You can see the appeal, and countless underground/overground impotents
seem to have grasped it with both mucky hands. However cartoonish the
representation of Cactus Jack’s basement dwelling, alt-right inadequate becomes during the course of
this film’s intense 88 minutes, you could never accuse writer/director
team Chris and Jay Thornton of being over the top. Fact is,
the occasional unwelcome dip into certain twitter timelines, the Capitol
riots, the emetic Breitbart (still going!), all serve to show that this
sort of archetype is all too present, and seemingly beyond parody.
With his Charles Manson (an early adopter of this type of dummy-spitting)
beard and pate, R. Michael Gull as the titular character is deeply
unpleasant and utterly convincing as reiterates his tired, second-hand
doctrine and mugs for the camera of Chris (Sam Koze), a
documentarian who has (unwisely) chosen this dangerous div as a subject.
For the film’s first half, the Thorntons present Ronald aka Cactus Jack’s
screed as is. It is like watching a scarier Paul Joseph Watson, and this
snowflake reviewer did wonder if this sort of approach inadvertently
indulges the sort of hatred Ronald epitomises (at one point he,
inevitably, has a go at ‘libtard f****t P.OS.s’ - I’m like, no need to get
personal, yeah?), and is the probable reason for the eager disclaimer
which the film presents at the start. But then again, how else would a
filmmaker honestly portray this sort of twerp? Eventually, cinema
distances and the camera objectifies, with the deep
Eraserhead monochromes and industrial score of
Cactus Jack providing grim aesthetic remove from the bogus
ideologies of its central character.
What is also incredibly striking is the duo’s documentary-style use of
archived footage. Scenes from American Sit-Coms, cartoons and news footage
all are spliced together with Ronald’s nonsense, providing a visual
mixtape which offers a potted history of the pop-culture standards which
may well have given rise to Ronald’s innate superiority and hysterical
fear of the other. These bravura editing skills are important to the
palatability of Cactus Jack’s storytelling, too, as, in honesty, just like the bloke in the pub who
is ‘just saying’, Ronald’s nonsense soon gets predictable and tiresome.
Duly, just as a true fascist cannot run on baseless hatred alone and
either fizzles out or steps up a level, Cactus Jack’s last act takes a turn for the slightly absurd.
In a fit of pique, Ronald only goes and kidnaps his documentarian,
subjecting him to weird sexual abuse (as ever, what is apparently
homophobia almost always turns out to be bitter jealousy), and then sets
himself up on the dark web as one of those vloggers you hear about. It is
as if a radicalised Rupert Pupkin had access to a YouTube account
(fascinating how The King of Comedy has been such a
recurrent touchstone over the last few years)!
The film, inevitably, runs out of steam towards the end (there is only so
much you can take of this one note arsehole), and switches in possible
explorations of why Ronald is the way he is (Mummy issues, Daddy issues,
latent homosexuality - at one point Ronald’s mum can be heard screaming ‘I
wish you had been stillborn!’, like some John Waters heroine).
It’s fair enough that the Thorntons attempt to add dimension to their
character, but I am not sure how far this approach convinces. After all,
there would have to be a lot of abusive mothers and reluctant gays out
there to explain the massive rise in the alt-right. Perhaps a more
persuasive explanation for this sort of extremism is the alienation which
our inter-connected, ultimately estranging media landscape engenders - a
deeply human need to be a part of something bigger. This is an
inconvenient truth consolidated by Cactus Jack’s eventual rise to social media dominance, with the film sardonically
suggesting that even relative fame and acceptance isn’t enough to sate
Ronald’s dissatisfaction with the world at large and with himself.
Cactus Jack is on US VOD now (watch it here). A
UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
