REVIEW: Assassination Nation Fascination Dissipation

Assassination Nation, based on the hashtags #woke and #metoo, is an in-your-face, self-consciously edgy satire about a town called Salem that goes witch-hunting after everyone’s online accounts are hacked and their secrets (and nude pics) are exposed. The primary target of everyone’s ire is Lily (Odessa Young), an above-it-all high-schooler who’s blamed for the hack, but she and her friends are mostly scapegoats. Some of what happens is harrowingly plausible (especially when it comes to police behavior and mob rule), and writer-director Sam Levinson (Another Happy Day) adeptly captures the dark side of a weaponized internet on his way to delivering a Tarantino-style bloodbath. But Levinson also loves to point the camera at girls’ butts while having those girls decry the male gaze — you might say he puts both asses in “Assassination” — and he’s eye-rollingly gleeful about alerting us to the movie’s “trigger warnings,” which appear on the screen in red, white, and blue lettering. (You can tell he really wanted to squeeze the word “American” into the title but couldn’t find a way.) The movie is raucous fun and occasionally suspenseful or horrific, but not nearly as insightful as it thinks it is.

Grade: B-

1 hr., 47 min.; rated R for disturbing bloody violence, strong sexual material including menace, pervasive language, and for drug and alcohol use – all involving teens