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Ink is apparently some low budget sort of surreal movie that I have never heard of. That's either a really good sign, or a really bad sign. Let's find out which! OK, here's some dude, he is Angry. He gets in a car accident, some goth kid grabs his temple, and... now he's sleeping in his bed with a little kid poking him in the face. His kid apparently. And now they're both off playing outside. Apparently at least one of these two is dead, and this is a dream and/or flashback. Anyway, dad sucks at the whole playing pretend sorta thing, is not into it at all, but eventually shows some inappropriate enthusiasm shouting to an imaginary monster, "Hey, get away from her you asshole!" which is somewhat random.
Now suddenly we have this big huge montage of people going to sleep. And now here's a bunch of people flickering into existence in the middle of the street, climbing up onto people's roofs ad breaking into their rooms to apparently either create or just kinda spy on their dreams. See, this is the sort o ambiguity that doesn't particularly add to my enjoyment in any way. I mean, that's a potentially important distinction, but it's not the sort of thing that is going to make me go wow when you clear it up. Opening narration might even be called for. Ah, but here we go, now some other flickery people are showing up, who have a way better look because they don't stop flickery and have this weird monitor faces, and they're pretty clearly giving people nightmares. I have to gripe though about this big ol' montage of dreams here, because I have been totally spoiled by stuff like Paprika, where we see people's dreams and they actually resemble dreams. There's no real surrealism here, so these are just kind of memories and realistic hopes/fears here.
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Oh hey, here's something. Some raggedy weirdo with chains sneaks into the room of the little kid with the lousy and possibly dead dad, apparently to kidnap her. All the good dream giving types in the vicinity try to fight him off in what has to be the single hardest to watch fight scene I have ever seen. It has this low framerate, REALLY goes the shakey-cam route, and zooms in way too close on everything, so you just get a big blurry headache. It is kinda neat how since nobody here physically exists, any time they grab a lamp and bash someone over the head or kick someone through a table, the damaged physical object is kinda rewound back to its initial status right after, but otherwise, this is just really painful. Anyway, kid is successfully dragged away, because these dudes kinda suck at winning a 3 on 1 fight. Anyway, for some reason we cut to Dad going to work for a while, just... for the heck of it I guess. Then we come back to Death looking dude taking Girl down some hallway lined with flickery images of things, and growling at one for being uncooperative.
Now we cut to an extra extra letterboxed scene of a big yellow forest. Some girl is walking through it. I meanwhile am getting rather annoyed at how this is a movie that's trying really hard to be all artsy and impressionistic, but is directed by someone who does not possess the skills and experience to actually deliver on that. It's the sort of movie you tell people is an incoherent mess, and then have to deal with people saying "Oh you just didn't GET IT." Oh hey, I'll have to get back to that. Someone with electrical tape X's over his eyes just showed up, and now him and this girl are actually giving us some actual DIALOG. First time anyone has said anything content bearing. X-eyes bum is kind of a jerk, who has been called in to help with this situation, because apparently he has special skills in that regard, being a "pathfinder." OK, that's something. So naturally it's time to cut away from this much needed exposition and go back to Death and Girl, jumping into a flickery image and appearing on a busy street. We did at least establish that Girl still has a physical body asleep in bed, so this is just some sort of dream world astral kidnapping. Apparently. So... the city street we're jumping into, and then wandering over to a manhole, revealing a hallway that leads to a green door to a weird dark room, this all represents... what exactly? I mean, it was a real world street with normal people who couldn't see these two, so.... something, right? Anyway, in this room, we have Bad Dream Bill Gates chewing Death out, and calling him Ink. So... this is our main character? Also, Ink has a really ridiculously huge nose now that I get a good look at it. I mean, I knew it was a cartoonishly big prosthetic but the thing is like a giant freaking potato or something, pointed outward.
Cutting back to the yellow forest, we seem to have missed our dialog window,
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OK, so now we're in the forest of the good guys, with X-eyes, goth girl, black guy, and drum girl, so, our mysterious weirdo and our 3 people who suck at fighting. They're all wandering over Girl's hospital bed, where her grandmother is hanging out and X-eyes ponders hat a deadbeat her dad is. Suddenly, we cut back over to Ink and Girl and here's a random weirdo picking a fight. I assume another good guy, but I base this on nothing in particular. Again, this is severely headache inducing. Ink gets his hood ripped off revealing his dorky as heck face, then threatens to use this switch on his wrist to kill her if this random person doesn't back off and uh... OK, we cut back to Dad at Work. These Dad at work scenes are just so frelling hollow. They ad nothing to the movie, there's no B-plot here, we're just tossing out generic Work dialog and establishing how Dad is a jerk. Suddenly he walks out of the office into a flashback. Seems he was poor white trash as a kid, and this is why he's such a driven Work Guy. OK, so yeah, we're doing a nice job of establishing this one character here, but this is rather pointless when he is so far COMPLETELY irrelevant to the actual plot.
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Ah, now at least we have the good guys tailing Dad, noticing that he has a monitor face following him, and calling it an Incubus... which... no. Incubus means something very specific, and this isn't it. And... back to Ink and Girl... and the other girl who picked a fight with him, who... is now following them around for some reason. She explains that whole good guys give good dreams thing, but again, it's a bit late to try and explain that, and vaguely implies that Ink here is an "Incubus" in training. I guess the girl kidnapping is a gang initiation sorta thing? Anyway, then they get mugged by some crazy guy. We threaten to actually explain a thing or two, but then cut back to some disjoint Dad stuff, likely a nightmare... and then to the good guys. I can't help but notice how nobody in this movie who actually ever talks talks like they're in the same movie. Goth girl is way too serious, X-eyes is kinda snarky, the crazy guy from earlier was totally going for wacky B-movie comedy relief... and aha. Apparently X-eyes is somehow orchestrating that car accident from the beginning of the movie to get Dad into coma land to help his daughter. Finally, something coherent. We're also clearly trying for one of those big elaborate chain reaction scenes like in City of Lost Children, but not really pulling it off that well. Still, not too bad.
Now, OK. At this point? We should be like 5 minutes into this movie. Maybe 10. This whole thing should be about Dad having to take this magical trip through coma land to rescue his daughter from the boogieman, with lots of surreal landscapes. Our good guys should be mysterious weirdoes who are established to be setting this up like they just did, and then screaming crazy gibberish at him constantly for exposition's sake. Instead, we have the only real plot point in this movie so far shoved way at the end, with a lot of failed artsiness before it. Oh, and we still aren't getting the plot ball rolling here, we're just in more Dad flashbacks. These of the happy I love my wife sort at least. Oh, and now we're back over to our other character group, because we're pretty much alternating to avoid scenes I'd actually like to see. We at least get some exposition over here now though, with Fighty Girl giving Ink a love and peace sorta speech and explaining how killing yourself then sacrificing a little kid to demons so you can get a crazy monitor instead of a giant nose is kind of a dick movie. Then it's off to see a terrible actress to get a MacGuffin apparently. So yeah, when you die you either become a "storyteller" or an "incubus" or a random crazy weirdo who doles out plot coupons, apparently. In this case, bad actress refuses to give Ink a plot coupon unless she can give Fighty Girl a bad haircut first. Why? Because apparently the script needed padding.
Cutting back to the yellow forest, we seem to have missed our dialog window,
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Back with the good guys, have I mentioned how X-eyes looks a lot like Dane Cook? I just keep expecting him to pour a bottle of water over his head and start rambling about wanting acidy spit. Anyway yeah, Dad flashbacks more about dead wifey. Because this movie really likes to go overboard explaining the stuff that's totally obvious from context, and wasting your time being arbitrarily slow in explaining its personal mythology and attempting to actually advance the plot. Meanwhile, in what I'm now sure is inspired by Neverwhere, Fighty Girl is continuing to kinda try and passively guilt trip Ink into doing the right thing. If she succeeds, she will render like, 80% of this movie a COMPLETE waste of the audience's time. Anyway though, they finally reach what I think is supposed to be Incubus HQ, because there's a lot of Incubi staring at them now and holding up plaster hands on the ends of wooden poles. Hmm, so that's what would happen if I invented the Fing-long-er. And... more Dad flashbacks. Ugh. This movie has SO MUCH PADDING and bad editing! Can we please please have some sort of actual plot? Is that really too much to ask?
Well, now we have some plot threatening to happen, with a whole bunch of Incubi stalking the good guys, and removing their monitors to reveal scary glowing glasses... and we've also officially worn out our welcome on color saturation here. We also seem to be getting into another headachey fight scene. Eventually though, Dad wanders off to find the room his daughter is in, which is presumably what most of this movie has been about trying to get him to do. So we of course have to cut away again to Girl. And she's being brought before uh... the bathtub of evil I guess. To see the Incubus leader who apparently has two sets of eyelids or little monitors for eyes that occasionally flash images of regular eyes real quick. Anyway, he stabs Fighty Girl, then picks up regular Girl and sticks her in the bathtub of evil.
And oh hey, here's our big plot twist. Apparently Ink is actually Dad after committing suicide. Which... absolutely makes no sense. I mean, yeah, our two plot threads don't really touch on each other at any point, so I GUESS the Ink stuff could be taking place after everything else but... why did he kill himself? Because his daughter he didn't really care about was in a coma? All the good guy stuff was... them trying to get him to care so his daughter would be shocked back to life and... failed? So she didn't wake up and then he killed himself, but he wouldn't kill himself if he didn't care... and oh, now after we have some climactic non-sensical fight scenes, we have girl waking up in the hospital.... so apparently half of this movie was some kind of hallucinatory flash forward to a possible future for dad where he kills himself after a sinful life and becomes... No! I'm sorry movie! This does not make any sense! Period! She was in a coma because her soul was stolen by her future dad's tortured ghost, from a possible future timeline that clearly does not happen, in what isn't even a time travel story. If she doesn't fall into a coma, she doesn't die, he presumably doesn't kill himself, and thus there's no bad ghost him to put her in the coma. Especially since the ending is trying to be all "this is what will happen if you don't change your ways about it." You have a movie with a grand total of about two plot points, and they contradict each other. Congratulations.
