Renegade

Things have been a bit slow here as we prep for our upcoming vacation. So because of that you get more movie reviews. A bit of set up first though. Grant Morrison is a writer I like. I don't understand even half of everything he does, but even the parts I don't get are so out there that I enjoy them. So a while back I was reading a summary of a talk Grant Morrison gave and in it he says:

The best depiction of a drug experience is in Renegade. If you haven't seen Renegade go get Renegade.

And why should you trust his opinion? Because by his own admission when he was younger:

I just started to take tons of psychadelic drugs...

So the guy has some real life experience to back up this claim. I decided what heck, since I don't foresee ever partaking of psychedelic substances I thought it might be interesting to see what I'm missing out on and give this Renegade movie a shot. And the result is, well, it's ... different. It was two hours of a long drawn out story that seems to go nowhere then diverges into this crazy psychedelic light show acid trip for the last ten minutes or so. Believe it or not it's a Western. And the main character is tight with a local Indian tribe that occasionally partakes of the drugs for spiritual enlightenment. But that's not where the drug trip comes into play. It's hard to even try and sum this up, but the gist is this kid Mike whose parents send him out west because he's unruly gets run out of town after a skirmish with Blount, a local bad guy, results in a prostitute they were both visiting getting killed. Indians take Mike in and raise him, but at some point he heads back and ends up as Marshal of the town. Then the Blount shows back up. With me so far? Up to this point it was an okay film, but suddenly the movie just goes off the rails. There's this crazy Prussian (played by Eddie Izzard) with semi magical powers that is searching for a transdimensional cache of Indian treasure that can only be found with some map that came from who knows where. Make sense? No? It gets better. Anyway, the bad dude and Mike end up in treasure trove and Blount ends up going on what appears to be an acid trip that will, I think, allow him to become one with the universe and destroy all of existence. So that Mike goes on a similar drug trip and somehow enters Blount's consciousness so that he can prevent the Blount from destroying reality. At no time during this sequence are the two individuals seen and everything is just a crazy light show that really makes very little in the way of sense (like I should be expecting that from the movie at this point). Uhhh, right. Let me speak into my intercom for a second: Clean up on aisle three! We have plot all over the place. The story was actually decent up until when the magic crap entered into the picture. And as for the drug sequence? I honestly found that to be bit boring (there's only so much colored lights and intangible light animals I can take). Overall not one I would watch again.