Spree (2020) This movie seems so inevitable, it's a wonder it wasn't thought of sooner......
Not that the dark abyss rabbit-hole world of social media has been ignored.....fledgling indie filmmakers used it mostly as a springboard for horror....("Unfriended", "Friend Request") or suspense ("Searching")........
"Spree" may be the first of these films to cast a cold satirical eye on the generation of media obsessed You-Tubers and Instagramers who validate their lives and their self-worth by the number of hits on their sites and videos.
The film presents us with Kurt Kunkle (Joe Keery of "Stranger Things"), who's a stitched together amalgam of Robert DeNiro's two iconic celebrity-addicted psychos, Rupert Pupkin of "The King Of Comedy" and Travis Bickle of "Taxi Driver".
Kurt struggles mightily to join the ranks of social media 'influencers' , but the fact that he's unfunny, pathetic and desperately obnoxious keeps his on line audience in single digits.
In a stroke of inspiration, Kurt becomes a rideshare driver, outfits his car with multiple webcams and proceeds to brutally murder his unlucky passengers.....(whom the movie depicts as all self-absorbed jerks who had it coming anyway, as repulsive as Kurt himself.....
And Kurt also adds to his 15 minutes of fame by killing off the object of his most jealous rages, the social media superstar whom Kurt used to babysit.
Furiously paced and energized by Keery's manic performance, director Eugene Kotylarenko splatters the screen with multiple images..........not only of Kurt's allnight rampage but the expected non-stop flood of comments from hundreds of trolls who now flock to watch Kurt pile up dead bodies on his live stream.......
Ultimately, the movie simply wears you with its hammered-home overkill....(both the movie's and Kurt's) until you want scream, "Enough....enough.....we get it already...."
But we did enjoy the idea of Kurt finally meeting karma at the hands of his new obsession, the savvy, whip smart stand-up comedian Jessie Adams (deftly played by 'Saturday Night Live' alumnus Zasheer Zamata).
You'll have to decide for yourselves how much of this overly repetitive stuff you can tolerate, especially since the film makes its point in the first 15 minutes of a 90 minute running time........on the other hand, anyone really into the mad, mad world of vloggers might want to view it a second time to catch all those troll comments.......2 & 1/2 stars (** 1/2)
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