The Inspection (2022, Elegance Bratton) (Patreon)

46/100

Put this off for months, because I more or less knew that it would trigger my antipathy for films that just pile abuse upon one or more wholly innocent characters for the duration. (And I couldn't bail, according to my silly self-imposed rules, because it was in NYFF.) Sure enough, Bratton's semi-autobiographical tale features roughly 60 straight minutes of insanely vicious boot-camp homophobia, bookended by a couple of scenes in which even the protagonist's mother utterly rejects him simply for being gay. Ellis gets beaten in the shower by his fellow recruits (after fantasizing about them and popping a boner, which maybe that actually happened to Bratton but it plays onscreen more like a lurid cautionary tale dreamt up by the assholes who used to whine about "unit cohesion"; ditto Ellis actively hitting on his one empathetic drill instructor in another shower scene*); he very nearly gets drowned—like, literally drowned, as in murdered—by the movie's ultra-hard-ass Gunnery Sgt. Hartman type (played with admirable restraint by Bokeem Woodbine; the third D.I., however, is actively trying to do an Ermey impression, and is awful); he gets cheated during the crucial firing-range test (in a way that seems highly implausible to me, and indeed someone immediately calls the cheater out); etc. There's zero nuance to any of it, nor any real indication, apart from narrative necessity, as to why the others suddenly shift from abhorrence to respect (however grudging) when graduation rolls around. Weirdly, the one conventional instance of moral courage, in which a recruit refuses a direct order to point his rifle at another (Muslim, also widely reviled) recruit, not only doesn't involve Ellis at all—the courageous Marine-to-be is such a minor figure that I don't think I'd previously noticed him—but declines even to clock Ellis' reaction to it. Only hint of emotional complexity comes at the very end, when Ellis' mama (Gabrielle Union, killin' it) finally embraces him, only to soon reveal that her acceptance was predicated on her assumption that he could only have made it through if the military had somehow turned him straight. That Bratton dedicates the film to his own mother choked me up a little, and I sorta dug the counterintuitively weird Animal Collective score. Otherwise, though, file squarely under Just Not For Me. 

* That parenthetical was growing unwieldy, but there's also the shot of Ellis on night-watch duty or whatever, walking anxiously past rows of bunks in which every single guy is visibly jerking off beneath the sheets. Again, I can't knowledgeably deem that preposterous...but I spent a couple of weeks in minimum-security jail (long, long ago; long, dumb story), sleeping in basically an identical rows-of-bunkbeds arrangement, and neither touched myself nor saw/heard anyone else touch himself the entire time. So I am skeptical.