Boot Camp

Released by: MGM
Released on: 8/25/2009
Director: Christian Duguay
Cast: Mila Kunis, Gregory Smith, Peter Stormare, Regine Nehy, Alejandro Rae
Year: 2007
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The Movie:

A pretty young woman forcibly taken from her loving boyfriend…held captive on an isolated island with little chance of escape…brutalized by the male guards and her captors…her loneliness made worse by her longing for her lover…her desperate attempt at escape…sounds familiar doesn't it? Like a good ol' "Women In Prison" flick. Well, it sort of is, minus the sleaze and the lesbians.

Mila Kunis stars as Sophie, a rich kid who's father died, her mother re-married, and she gave them grief by lying about things her step-father did. She is apparently so unruly, that she deserves to be “rehabilitated” at a retreat for troubled teen-agers. This “boot camp” is located on the other side of the world, Fiji, and is very desolate and supposedly impossible to escape from. Her trip over is spent with three other captives (males…oh well, there goes the all-female shower scene) and they spend the night chained to blocks in the surf, fighting to keep from drowning when the tide comes in for the evening.

The next morning she is introduced to the camp, and one of the first things she gets is a cavity search…nope…they didn't show it. Anyway she quickly learns that the camp actively promotes mistreatment of the inmates by the staff and the inmates themselves. The kids who surrender to the brain washing get promoted by shirt color: black if your low, yellow is mid-ground, and white for the kids on the road to rehabilitation. The white kids have it good, the black kids have it bad. Maybe a different choice in shirt color would have been better. At any rate things go from bad too worse for poor Sophie.

Meanwhile her boyfriend Ben (played by Gregory Smith of Everwood fame), who was being intimate with her when she was taken away (nope, they were clothed), decides he is going to save her and gets himself sent to boot camp, the exact same boot camp as it turns out (his plan all along). He then convinces her to escape with him. They escape, get caught, and are returned to the camp and subsequently punished.

The camp director and program creator, Dr. Hail (Peter Stormare) decides Ben and Sophie as a team are too much of a risk to his operation and tells Ben that he will be returning home in a few days. It is during that time that a series of events take place that result in the big showdown at the end of the movie, which I'm sure you can predict without taxing your brains.

So let me just start by saying this is not an awful movie. It's actually not that bad. The characters aren't really likable, but neither are they easy to hate. The acting is better than you would expect, at least from the main actors, and even though Peter Stormare has played much better characters (Karl Hungus in The Big Lebowski, Satan in Constantine, that guy who never said much in Fargo) I always enjoy seeing him pop up. It seemed to be a pretty well-made film, nice photography anyway, and the subject matter is certainly interesting. I was only bored with it in a couple of places but not for too long.

Alright, so its missing the sleaze factor. There's a couple of places where we * should * see some nudity, but they always opted for the cut-away-just-in-time trick or the ol' “strategically covered” routine. Fine, nudity doesn't make a movie (but it certainly can break one). Move on. But what this movie really lacks is some balls. Yes, the kids are brutalized, humiliated, and in some cases raped, but it seemed so homogenized. Almost afraid of going a little too far; you know, pushing the envelope. Really make us feel for these kids; get us angry at the way they are treated; make us want the rapist guard to die horribly; make us glad to see what happens to the wrong-doers at the end. But what happened for me was the opposite. I didn't feel bad for them, I really felt bad for one of the guards in the way he died, and I was kind of unimpressed with the way things turned out. The movie started weak, was interesting enough most of the way, and then ended kind of with a fizzle rather than a satisfying finale. One other thing that killed me is this movie is so dark, and I don't mean in the morbid way. Sometimes I had to really look to process what was on the screen. And they used that friggin' green color correction thing. Everything has a green hue to it, to the point that sometimes the yellow shirts looked orange.

Video/Audio/Extras:

The copy I viewed was a test disc/screener. The 20th Century Fox bug popped up here and there. That alone gets the picture quality a 0 out of 5, but there's more. Where this is not the final product, I can not say for certain if the street copies share the same issue, but I saw a lot of compression in scenes with a fair amount of black, and there's quite a few of those. As mentioned above, the picture was very dark at times, maybe due to the un-finished quality of the disc, maybe due in part to the green filter used. It was distracting at times.

The disc has a soundtrack in 5.1 Dolby Surround, and at times they use it well, like with the sound of the surf hitting the beach. Most times it is noticeable when music was playing. Other than that I didn't really hear anything noteworthy. It sounded fine from a technical aspect. There are no pops, hisses, or obvious glitches. There didn't seem to be any spots that were too quiet or too loud. Also, there are subtitles available, but only in English.

There's a few trailers before the Main Menu appears that you can only see at the beginning, so I guess those don't really count. There's a menu item marked “Trailers” (but there's only one for Dragonball: Evolution), so I guess that's technically an extra. Other than that nothing. It could be due to the copy being a test disc, and because that's what I got so that's what I'm reporting.

The Final Word:

Yeah, it lacked boobage and skanky ho's laying around in the bunk house half naked, and it didn't quite pack the wallop it could have, but overall it was a tolerable movie. It's definitely better than a lot of the fodder that comes out these days. It's not something I was suggest you go out of your way to see, but I wouldn't tell you to avoid it. This version is “unrated”, but aside from some drug use scenes and a couple of rape situations, I'm sure this will make its way to late night cable channels. If you see it on, give it a shot.