Review: "Kaboom" has More Fizzle than Fireworks

Thomas Dekker in Kaboom

I don't know quite what to make of Kaboom, the latest project from Gregg Araki. For many years, the independent filmmaker was best known as part of the film movement called the New Queer Cinema, a sub-genre of indie films that began to pop up in the early '90s, and his entries were inconsistent, to say the least.

His The Living End, a road movie centering around two HIV-positive lovers, was barely watchable for this viewer, and his Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, which he clearly intended to be watched while high in your dorm at 2:30 in the morning, ran the gamut from bewilderingly silly to just plain depressing in its nihilistic view of the world.

But then in 2005, he went and made Mysterious Skin, easily his best film to date, and what's more, one of the best gay films of the decade – a decade, mind you, that also brought us the likes of Brokeback Mountain and Shelter. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and making full use of his astonishing talent, the film is dark, and the subject matter squirm-inducing – the story concerns two victims of child abuse and the very different paths their lives take them on – but unlike his previous films, he guided the story along with a sure, mature hand. The punky outsider filmmaker was now all growed up.

If only that were true.

Let's get this part out of the way: it's taken me a few days to figure it out, but I've decided I can say that I liked Kaboom ... up to a point. But much like the movie's plot, it's not that simple.

The story plays out a bit like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite there being no Buffy, no vampires, and no slayers. Thomas Dekker, who played the famously de-gayed character in Heroes, and was one of a growing army of Hollywood actors to play John Connor in the Terminator franchise, is surprisingly good here as Smith, the queer main character who is haunted by a prophetic dream which draws him ever closer to … a garbage dumpster.

Thor, Smith's eye-candy and oft-nude roommate

Smith is your typical Araki hero – young, sexy, angsty, and frequently naked – and Dekker is an actor to look out for. But he is upstaged by not one but two excellent ladies: Juno Temple, who plays the British sex kitten London (seriously), and Haley Bennet, Smith's deadpan lesbian BFF who finds herself entangled in a romantic relationship with an evil sorceress (again, seriously).

When Smith firsts meet London, she assumes he's gay and wants to sleep with him, because according to her, that's her thing. Smith refuses to accept the label "gay," preferring the term "undeclared," like a major in college. And that brings us to what might be the most interesting aspect of the film: it's a genre picture with a lead who is, at least according to his actions if not his labels, bisexual.

That there is a dearth of bisexual male leads in film is no surprise - in fact, the only other one that springs to mind is Colin Farrell's character in A Home at the End of the World. Even though Kaboom implies Smith is mostly gay - he lusts after his roommate, he masturbates to gay adult films, and he has anonymous sex with a man on a beach - the fact remains that he does seem to get a lot of emotional and sexual satisfaction out of his rendezvouses with London. And when seen from a wider cultural perspective, the inclusion of a bisexual male lead is certainly a welcome development.

The plot is pushed forward after Smith attends a party and eats an LSD-laced cookie, and then has a trip in which he sees men in animal masks murder a girl he had seen in his dreams. Or maybe it didn't happen. He was on LSD, remember. Much of the movie follows Smith as he tries to figure out what he saw.

Does the plot sound ridiculous to you? Of course it does.

But here's the thing: rather than constantly winking to the camera, the characters believed what was happening, and because they did, so did I. The more I think about it, the more frustrated I become that Araki was really just playing a prank on his audience, putting out a press release about how inspired he was by Twin Peaks and wanted to craft a similarly spooky and intriguing mystery, and then rolling out the first hour that was just that.

But it was a prank, because despite the fact that he had me as an audience member invested in what was happening, everything was completely undone by the last act's descent into utter silliness and camp, and a final sight gag – meant to be surprising – that I saw more than a decade ago in a Mortal Kombat video game.

And that led me to ask: was he trying to make a real movie and just couldn't figure out how to end it? Or if it was meant to be a joke the whole time, was it really worth paying all those actors and crew?

It's clear Araki wanted to “return to form” and construct another cult film. And I have no doubt that some drunk college freshmen will find this movie terrific. But after the sublime experience of watching Mysterious Skin, I was hoping for a little more.