Review of The Proposition.

I found myself wishing that I was the group of chatty 50-something yuppies (this coming from a 20-something embryonic yuppie) sitting behind me who didn't know who Alex and AJ nor Raven Simone were during the pre-film slideshow and probably don't know who Nick Cave is or that he sings his way through the soundtrack of the movie he wrote. Just knowing that Mr. Cave has released albums with titles like Murder Ballads made the whole get up that is The Proposition seem too...gotten up. This movie veers between a kind of post-modern realism (viscous blood and sweat stained blouses abound) with an equally post-modern sense of what constitutes myth (but what Jameson just called the post-modern's propensity to surface). This movie just has no real sense of time or place. Two things that drove me crazy was the inconsistent characterization of the captain and the botched reference to Origin of Species (it wasn't until Descent of Man some 10 years after OofS that Darwin dared advance his theories of human evolution). If you like your violence crunchy and slurpy then you might not mind this film. And if you have been in a cave that isn't named Nick, then you might feel a bit more unbiased than I did.