Let me back up a moment. When I say that "American Renegades" is not clever, I mean that this film's visual strengths are often far greater than everything else. Unfortunately, that isn't saying much. Just look at the film's cold opening looting montage. Without almost any dialogue, we see: French paintings getting loaded up by Nazis in ... oh, it's France, there's the Eiffel Tower, but ... oh, the Nazis are leaving, and they've got bars of gold, too ... from an unknown origin ... and oh, whoa, there's a French lady telling her son to flee ... wait, is she French ... she's not speaking French, what language is that ... also, I don't know if she's Jewish, or a collaborator, or a Nazi, or a freedom righter, or ... what exactly am I looking at here?
I had to rewatch this opening sequence three times before I understood what was happening. Which is a bit of a problem when your film opens with an overly-complicated montage that ineffectively serves as a one-stop shop for all your establishing plot needs, including a mysterious dangling conclusion involving a bunch of random freedom fighters, whose leader briefly shows himself and prepares to use one of those cool-looking plungers that you always see Wile E. Coyote using to blow himself up. I had no idea who those freedom fighter guys were either, because there was pretty much no dialogue to establish a meaningful relationship between them and the viewer. The looting montage finally ends with a title card: "American Renegades." Oh, great, now the movie starts?
I can see why someone might take to "American Renegades" because of its confident visuals and snarky humor. But I didn’t, because it takes too much time to figure out why I’m looking at, well, anything. Because once I did figure out what I was looking at, the film's skin-deep style and juvenile humor made me wonder why I worked so hard in the first place! “American Renegades” may be of some interest because it requires viewers to take a little more effort to assemble the film's jokes and plot. But, as Gene Shalit might have said: this movie often tested my patience, so I failed to enjoy it.
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