A Major Disappointment

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A small group of documentary filmmakers chronicle the trials and inequities faced by Mexican illegal immigrants. When they join a group of families illegally crossing the border to record the experience firsthand, their truck is pulled over and detained. What happens next plunges their group into unimaginable horror.......So the basic premise is simple, Mexicans try and cross the border into USA, and some make it, some get sent back, and others get caught by Peter Stormare and his masked henchman.And if you get caught by the latter, you spend the rest of the film either getting tortured, questioned, or put in a room that looks really comfortable.It's a sound idea, but it would have been a lot more convincing if this was full on found footage horror, not half and half like it is here. The film tries to be topical, tries to send a message of everyone is equal no matter who they are etc., but alas, it turns into torture porn, and spoils its good intentions.The cast are okay, but they spend the entire movie panicking, in pain, or giving their captors a little bit of attitude before they in turn, act nice before torturing them.And that's literally the film, a good idea, but it plays it too safe and goes down the normal horror route.

As much as there is to criticize about "Undocumented," I have to admit it does a very audacious thing, at least for a horror picture made on the caliber and budget of cheapsploitation classics like "Baker County" and "I Spit on Your Grave": it forces you to actually turn the camera eye on yourself and your beliefs on illegal immigration, whatever they may be, and then confront the very real, but often unseen, after shocks of those beliefs.Pretty boy and girl Scott Mechlowicz and Alona Tol head up a group of five scarily naive grad students who are doing their thesis on the plight of illegals and their often fatal journeys across the border by...get this: actually aiding them in their trek. If you can get past this admittedly foolhardy and absurd premise, the rest of the film is actually *easier* to swallow, and that's what makes it so much harder to watch and, by turns, to look away from.On arriving on New Mexico soil, they are immediately ambushed by a gang of paramilitary "patriots" led by "Z" (an insanely chilling Peter Stormare who remains masked for virtually the entire film). What follows is nothing we haven't seen before in the "Hostel" films: ritual humiliation, torture, and full-on carnage, but...this time it's not for the lark of a few rich and twisted businessmen to get their rocks off. No, these sadists actually have a point to make and, for me at least, this really catapulted this snuff box of a movie into a very discomfiting and visceral space in my brain."Undocumented" isn't the first horror film to shove hatred into our line of sight and then force us to ingest it, but it does it in such a convincing stylized nightmare way to make it difficult to shake off. More than a few people I've talked to have had a rough time forgetting this film purely because much of Stormare's didactic prattling has inadvertently (or not) come from their own mouths at one time or another. It's disquieting in a way few horror films manage to achieve because, unlike high-handed circle jerks such as "Funny Games," you can see where the villain's bile originates.In addition to Stormare's tour-de-sicko turn, Mechlowicz continues his run of quietly breakout performances: from "Mean Creek" to "Gone" to this film, he seems bent on forcing you to look past his air-brushed looks by turning in very convincing portraits of deeply-troubled, morally conflicted heroes and villains. The fact that he effectively 180's you from believing his character a pompous a-hole to someone you feel genuine pity for is pretty amazing in itself.Look, this isn't Citizen Kane. It's not even Citizen Ruth...newcomer Chris Peckover doesn't have the chops of Alexander Payne or Orson Welles. Not yet, anyway. Still this isn't your big brother's crappy little torture flick from the turn of the millennium. No, this one is a bit too true to life for something you'll forget that easily. Even if you wish you could.

OK, let's discuss the cinema verite.All mexicans are good, family oriented, extraordinarily poor innocent people who only want to come to America the land of opportunity.Of course, when you are on the wrong side of of the law, things tend to go haywire.In a very obtuse way, this film reminded me of Midnight Express -- you know the film where libby liberal Hollywood wanted us to feel sorry for a guy who wants to brings back tens of pounds of pot to sell in the states, gets caught and is thrown in a Turkish prison.From the get go there's no involvement in the main characters because they are breaking the law.And to this point, if these Mexicans are so poor, how can they dig up thousands of dollars to be transported over the border? For next to nothing, they can buy a used car and drive over the border legally and just never go back.It's ridiculous.Ohm and then there's the fact they don't even look Mexican and dress way too nicely and have way too designer hairdoos to be remotely poor.So in the first 10 minutes you just don't care about them and can't wait for the violence to ensue.Parenthetically, one has to wonder why the "american" vigilantes all have Mexican accents. Jeeze this film is dumb.One more thing -- when are you hack writers and directors going to stop putting in the signal less cellphone in the picture? It's been done in every movie like this. We get it.It's dumb.Let's be frank, this flick is nothing more than a pandering exploitation flick hoping to cash in on real problems the filmmakers are too dumb and vapid to understand.It's a bore fest.The hot chicks on vacation scenario is far more believable and entertaining. Go with that concept next time.

'Undocumented' follows a documentary crew who is attached to a group of Mexican immigrants who have paid enormous sums of money to a coyote (not the cat-snatching mongrel, rather a smuggler of people) to get into the United States. Illegally, in case you weren't getting the point. The irony is that legal entrance to the United States is cheaper and safer, if safety is part of the calculation - but that's politics, and a hard topic to rationally discuss in Texas, California, or Arizona.Incredibly the creators of 'Undocumented' use blood and abject terror to drive the discourse in a way that TV's Border Wars simply cannot. And no matter what side you sit on the political spectrum, you will think about the subject matter.The crew, the coyote, and the huddled and downtrodden Mexican subjects are high-jacked minutes after they cross the border. Since they are all in the back of a cargo truck, they all figure they're busted. What's unusual is that the Border Patrol doesn't normally take in the illegal aliens in the same transport carrying them. And they would probably not hear the coyote getting body-slammed and some stick-time just prior. They are all offloaded and corralled. The obviously American film crew are individually interrogated, blindfolded and bound, in an effectively disturbing series of cut shots.They've been captured by an ultra-radical anti-(illegal)-immigration group: a more ruthless, sickeningly twisted, and better organized version of Arizona's Minutemen. There's really no dancing around that comparison. And they've got a message for the film crew they want to share.The group's leader, "Z" says it best (though I gotta paraphrase it - I really didn't expect the movie to be quotable): "Whatever you think is going on here, this is worse." Straight talk, delivered in skull-cracking, blood-splashing, bone-splitting reality.The synopsis on Time Warner described it as a "blood-soaked psychological thriller." And it is. I'll forgo much more plot description because it really needs to be seen to be understood. It's a fairly straightforward narrative, packed with tension and allegory. To tell you, dear reader much more is to spoil the uncomfortable fun.The cast does exceptional and memorable work: Liz, the high-minded liberal producer (Alona Tal, of lots o' TV and voice-overs since 2003); her erstwhile boyfriend and the project's journo-opportunistic director, Travis (Scott Mechlowicz, of 'Eurotrip'); the Mexican émigré cousin, Alberto (the more-than-credible Yancey Arias) of one of the crew, Davie (Greg Serano, with a solid TV CV); and drug-using sound guy smart ass, Jim (Alias' Kevin Weisman).Even the narratively expendable characters turn negligible "raw meat" roles into loss. The tragic chorus of ill-fated illegal aliens are authentic and utterly haunting, as if director Chris Peckover actually captured and tortured them. (He didn't. Right?)The film treads the kind of suggested territory that franchise torture porn such as Hostel and Saw is awkwardly compelled to throw at the audience in explicit, anatomically-correct splatter. The argument that such franchises are simply satire is lost: 'Undocumented' is pure and sophisticated satire that teases the sensibilities of the viewer without abusing them into disaffection. You care. And stranger still, your perspective - your "side" - is apt to vacillate. It's a "hard" movie.I could go on and on: I can't stop thinking about this film. I was on the edge of my seat early on, and gripped until the very end. It's a brilliant effort that touches nerves you may not even know you have. The closing shot and speech, the first reveal of the masked radicals, the enigmatic "Z" and the breadth of the cabal is unforgettable - cinema gold.Oh, yeah, "Z" - played by an actor to whom most of the $1.4mm budget probably went, and well worth it - was the subject of a little game. We resisted looking him up until the end of the film. Neither I nor she won, but we both slapped our foreheads with a big old DUH.