Rampage

William Friedkin chose to adapt the novel by William P. Wood, and much like Cruising, Friedkin’s last sole writing credit, there’s a serious attempt to tackle something that just doesn’t quite come together. I have admiration for Friedkin’s attempts at serious efforts to make a topical film that actually has both feet in reality, except that it makes these rather wide-ranging assumptions about the audience’s perception of the central issue that needed more explanation in the film itself while intentionally obfuscating key points, making the stakes of the central conflict unclear for a very long stretch.

Charlie Reece (Alex McArthur) kills a series of people, the better part of two families, over the course of several days, causing an uproar in the small city where he lives. This draws the attention of the new district attorney, a Republican who campaigned on using the death penalty, who assigns the incoming case to the assistant DA Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn), a liberal who was in the legislature and opposed the death penalty there. His orders are to pursue the death penalty as punishment, but first they need to catch Reece. After he kills the wife and elder son of Gene Tippetts (Roy Applegate), Reece gets cornered and captured after he flees, and the assumptions start.

The central core issue is around the death penalty and its application. There’s no real debate within the film about its merits or demerits (some scattered individual lines of dialogue, and no more), making it feel like Friedkin was assuming opposition from his audience without feeling the need to build it in dramatically. I don’t think it’s the worst assumption to make (though, opinion is still divided on the matter), but I still find its application here curious. The bigger problem though is the framing of the death penalty regarding the actual stakes of the case.

You see, there is Supreme Court caselaw (Ford v. Wainwright) that makes it unconstitutional to execute an insane person, but this is never brought up in the film. There is no explanation until very late what the dual sides of the potential outcome are. On the one hand, we know that there will be the death penalty, but what happens if the defense successfully argues insanity? It’s not explained until very late, so we’re left with little regarding what would happen if this defense actually plays out and succeeds with the jury. They keep bandying around the “not guilty by reason of insanity” phrase a few times, and it implies to me, a non-legal mind more general audience, that the film is implying that Reece would simply go free…which is insane, but the film gives me nothing else to assume. Sure, I could stop the film and look up caselaw about what it means, but that’s hard to do in a movie theater, now isn’t it? Again, it does get cleared up (he’d be put in a mental institution for study for the rest of his life), but that lack of clarity colors so much of the preparation and execution of the trial. It’s weird.

Friedkin was well-known for demanding realism in his films. The most famous behind the scenes story is probably his insistence on real counterfeiting happening on the set of To Live and Die in L.A., and I think that extends to the trial here. This feels like a real criminal trial. There are no surprise witnesses. Boxes of evidence pile up in front of the judge’s bench. The audience isn’t rowdy. The lawyers probably get too heated, but that’s, I think, excusable. The focus of what we see in the trial ends up being dueling testimony from expert witnesses regarding Reece’s sanity or lack thereof (again, the actual stakes of the ruling still hadn’t been laid out by this point in the film…it gets laid out in closing arguments). Fraser also ends up probably going too far into the Nazi metaphor in an argument with one of the doctors, really hammering it home well-beyond subtlety, which I found odd.

The resolution of everything is interesting with the jury coming back with their verdict, Fraser having gone completely for the death penalty and getting it, and Reece’s defense arguing for a final CAT scan to look into his brain to help with sentencing (why didn’t they do the CAT scan before? It’s one of those weird things in the script that honestly doesn’t make the most sense). So, Friedkin (and assumedly Wood, though there are apparently two completely different endings filmed for the movie, so I don’t know which one was Wood’s, if either of them were) takes his central character from one extreme to the other (the journey is solid even if the details around it don’t make the most sense), undercuts it, and then throws in even more good obfuscation about the rightness or wrongness of everything with a final little twist of fate.

Really, there’s something to admire at the heart of this film. I’m finally seeing the connective tissue across Friedkin’s filmography, and it’s not about obsession, it’s about evil changing the men who pursue it. With that in mind, the focus is fully on Fraser, and it mostly works. Biehn plays Fraser well, a man caught between his beliefs (as shallowly presented as they are), his job, and his sense of justice, all while he’s hit with evidence to get him to question everything. The problem is that what surrounds him is so janky. There are other positive things throughout as well. Applegate is tragic as the father and husband who leaves town with his sole remaining child, and McArthur is kind of terrifying of Reece, all while there are depictions of institutional malfeasance that are almost as scary. However, the stakes are just so unclear for so long that I think it undermines a lot of what’s going on.

I’ve read a short description of the alternate ending, though, and I think I would have loved that. Depressing, for sure, but exactly in line with what the story needs.

So, I admire Rampage to a certain extent, but I don’t think Friedkin pulls all of the pieces together all that well. It needed a rewrite, perhaps from someone else, but I appreciate the sense of realism he brought to the courtroom.

Rating: 2.5/4