The Aggression Scale (2012)

Director: Steven C. Miller
Writer: Ben Powell
Stars: Fabianne Therese, Ryan Hartwig, Dana Ashbrook, Derek Mears, Jacob Reynolds, Joseph McKelheer, Boyd Kestner, Lisa Rotondi and Ray Wise

Index: Make It a Double.

I met Derek Mears, like many of the people who kindly chose Doubles for me, at a horror convention and that’s where you might expect to find someone who’s 6’ 5” and missing all the hair on his body. Needless to say, he plays a lot of screen monsters, including Jason Voorhees in the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th.

However, Derek, like many of those people, didn’t choose two horror films for his double, as his first choice is an unusual action thriller.

It grabbed my attention quickly, lost it again and then, as I wondered if it was going to get it back, did so with style, turning this into a film I wasn’t expecting to see.

The setup is initially all violence. A woman returning home from a jog opens her door to a shotgun blast to the chest. Another guy is shot dead in a car in a warehouse. The killer is calm and matter of fact and takes a polaroid of each of his victims. An hour earlier, we learn why.

He’s Lloyd and he works for Bellavance, who appears to be some sort of crime boss released from jail on massive bail, because he was sent down for murder. He figures that he has a day or two to find a country that doesn’t extradite to the United States for him and his kid to go. His problem is that someone has his money, so off goes Lloyd to track down and kill everyone on a list. If he brings back the money, he gets the business.

So far, so good. The violence is good, Lloyd has an agreeably blasé approach to killing and Bellavance is played by Ray Wise. Sure, he has to make do with a trailer for a base, instead of an opulent mansion, but we can deal.

However, then the picture shifts on a dime. Suddenly, we’re watching the Rutledge family move house, apparently across country. Bill’s driving the van, which means that he’s got to deal with his non-communicative son, Owen, who’s annoying but possibly autistic. He’s very good at doing mazes. He doesn’t speak at all. Lauren’s driving the car, because Maggie’s arm is in a sling, and she’s obviously pissed about leaving the city, even if she doesn’t want to talk about it. I liked her even less.

I like the place they’re moving into, though. It’s a big house in big grounds and it’s neatly isolated. We don’t know much about them but the little we’ve garnered suggests that Bill and Maggie have only just got married, Lauren’s a cutter and they’ve checked Owen out of some sort of facility, so there’s clearly a story here. Given how the film started, it’s not too hard to figure out what it is and we fully expect Lloyd to come knocking on the door any time now. I have to say that I was rather looking forward to that because the Rutledges got off to a poor start with me. I was looking forward to Lloyd’s shotgun getting busy.

By the way, I don’t think that’s a spoiler, as it’s the only way these two plot strands were ever going to merge. Sure enough, it doesn’t take long and it’s so expected that it surely can’t count as a twist. However, what happens next does and I didn’t see it coming, so I need to be careful about what I say from this point.

Let’s just say that the aggression scale of the title, which is “a psychological test measuring the frequency of overt aggressive behaviors that may result in physical or psychological injury to others”, isn’t there because of Lloyd or indeed his partners in crime.

I should point out who they are because one of them is Derek Mears. He’s Chissom, not that it’s hard to recognise him when he isn’t clad in a hockey mask. Jacob Reynolds is Freddie and he’s just as easily recognisable, given that he’s the star of Gummo (i.e. the child on the poster). That leaves Joseph McKelheer as Wydofski.

What follows may or may not be what you’ll expect at this point in the film. Sure, it seems incredibly likely that Bill and Maggie have the money, so naturally some of what’s to come is going to revolve around finding it or, far more likely, persuading them to lead them to it. And sure, there are a couple of kids upstairs but it’s going to be the adults who have the cash.

Right?

Well, I think I’ve hinted enough. There’s an obvious comparison here to another film that I won’t name, just in case you didn’t catch my drift, and it’s a highly appropriate one. When Chissom goes upstairs to bring the kids down and certain things happen to prevent that, I’d actually named it in my notes, saying that I’d absolutely pay to see Derek Mears in a remake of that movie. I wasn’t expecting at that point that this is essentially that, except that it isn’t a comedy. It’s an action thriller, so it’s more of a cross between that film and First Blood, with a fifteen year old in the lead.

And, you know what? I’m down with that. I am totally down with it and now I’m looking forward to the next half dozen sequels, none of which exist and none of which probably will ever exist but I can certainly hope.

Owen is played by Ryan Hartwig, who’s best known for this film and a 2012 vampire film called The Thompsons, which ironically features one of his enemies here as one of his vampire family members there, Joseph McKelheer.

Hartwig does a fantastic job here, especially given that he never says a single word across the entire film. The last time I saw that—well, at least until the very end—was Sisu and it isn’t unfair to bring that up as a comparison too. It isn’t World War II and there are no Nazis, but young Owen is facing enemies who want to kill him and he goes about the task of solving that problem in much the same way and to much the same consequence as Aatami Korpi.

After Owen, Lauren probably has the biggest part and she grew on me as the movie ran on. Fabianne Therese is technically top billed and she does a good job, but Hartwig steals it from her without much effort at all.

After that, it’s the bad guys and that’s where Derek Mears comes in, as the most prominent of the sidekicks. Ray Wise isn’t in much of the film, just the beginning and the end, so it’s all down to Dana Ashbrook as Lloyd and his men.

They’re in charge from the outset and they stay that way until Chissom goes upstairs and the kids fight back and suddenly he’s not at all in charge. I wonder if he picked The Aggression Scale because he looks like the same big scary dude as usual but he finds himself continually losing out to a couple of kids, one of which is frustratingly silent. That must have felt fresh to him and I can understand why. I’m sure he would be back for a sequel!