Review – The Ogre

Some folks like to sample heavy-handed political allegory with a tiny teaspoon. Others enjoy a hearty meal of heavy-handed political allegory dished up with a soup ladle. However, if you’re the sort that likes to have your jaws clamped open and get great steaming buckets of heavy-handed political allegory crammed down your throat with a toilet plunger, then boy are you in the right place. The guy who directed The Tin Drum serves us another heapin’ helpin’ of grim Germanic moping about loss of innocence in the first half of the 20th century. The plot centers around a dim-witted Frenchman (John Malkovich) who ends up working on Hermann Goering’s game preserve during World War Two. The wholesale slaughter of animals (some obviously real) and children gets to be way too much to take, even as metaphor for the age. Final nail in the coffin: boring. Wish I’d skipped it