Weapons

Rank

Bottom 20% of all time (see others with this rank)

Festival Year

2007 (click here to see all competition films from this year)

Category

Dramatic Competition

Cast

Nick Cannon, Paul Dano, Mark Webber, Riley Smith, Regine Nehy, Jade Yorker, Amy Ferguson, Arliss Howard, Toni Trucks

Non-Cast Credits

Adam Bhala Lough, Rob Fried, Dan Keston, Bill Straus, Manuel Alberto Claro, Jay Rabinowitz, Alan E. Muraoka, Tere Duncan, Linda Phillips-Palo

Description

Reggie (Nick Cannon) is a young, responsible African American man about to have his first job interview when he spies a shiner on his little sister's face and becomes obsessed with finding a gun to exact revenge. Sean (Mark Webber) comes home from his first year in college to find that his old friends Chris (Paul Dano) and Jason (Riley Smith) are still playing basketball, getting into fights, getting high, and trying to hook up with high school girls. One day, Sean notices that Chris has started to travel around town with a shotgun packed in the back of his truck.

Violent youth culture gets an explosive, provocative update with Adam Bhala Lough's raw and stylized Weapons. Authentically depicting the myopic rhythms of American blue-collar suburban youth, Bhala Lough skillfully unravels the motivations of a group of teenagers who become enmeshed in a series of brutal, seemingly random, youth killings over the course of an intoxicated weekend. A haunted hip-hop soundtrack drenches this insightful study of teenage character and value systems in a world where everyone seems to have a gun, but the most dangerous weapon is the one unleashed by tender things broken inside innocent hearts.

Reviewer

Shari Frilot (see other films reviewed by the same reviewer)

Deconstructing Sundance | Abusing Statistics Since 2006