Postal

85 minutes too far, at that.

Director: Uwe Boll (2007)

Starring: Zack Ward, Dave Foley, Chris Coppola, Verne Troyer

Find it: IMDB, Amazon

I watched Postal the only way Postal should be watched: with a couple of good man-friends, a Chinese takeaway and a lot of alcohol. Bearing in mind that I'd just played Call Of Duty until my eyes bled and I was thoroughly quite smashed, one would think that conditions were prime for a film like Postal. Well, drunk and in the company of man-friends or not: Postal is still an irredeemable piece of shit movie.

I'm by no means a Uwe Boll defender, but I'm inclined to hate him less than some. I've never seen a good Boll film, but I've seen far worse than his Rampage. Even Auschwitz was technically if not morally competent. Please take it in context when I say that "Auschwitz was technically if not morally competent." What makes me doubt Auschwitz's intentions are the other films Boll has made. Films like this one, which depict Nazis and mass murder as quite funny. Once more, Boll has a little cameo for himself. He's like the Quentin Tarantino of video game adaptations.

I played Postal once. It's a puerile, stupid first person shooter in which you play an angry trailer trash man called 'Postal Dude' who for some reason wants to meet Gary Coleman. Al Quaeda feature quite heavily in the game, as they do the film. In Boll's adaptation, Postal Dude is played by Zack Ward. Postal Dude is still trailer trash, although he seems more confused than angry, and meets Verne Troyer instead of Gary Coleman. Warning: in the next paragraph I will use sentences and descriptions that may make you want to watch Postal. Do not watch Postal.

Postal is a movie where Verne Troyer is gang raped by monkeys and Uwe Boll plays himself as having financed his films with Nazi gold. There's a shootout in which only children die (I laughed. I'm a bad person on several levels there) and George W Bush shows up to hold hands with Osama Bin Laden. The opening sequence takes place in an airplane cockpit bound for the Twin Towers. On 9/11. You get the idea.

For all of this faux-offensiveness, Postal is an inept mess. It looks, sounds and feels like a Movie Movie, with no structure or story to speak of. The game was truly offensive by virtue of putting the player in Postal Dude's shoes. The film is not offensive. It's nothing like a live action South Park. South Park has intelligence and jokes, not just monkeys gang raping Verne Troyer. I hated Postal in the same way that I hate Family Guy; it will offend nobody but the sort of people who wouldn't watch it in the first place. Its offensiveness rings hollow, the desperate cries of an attention seeker begging for relevance. Postal should offend nobody except for fans of good movies.