Goat-2016
Director Andrew Neel
Starring Ben Schnetzer, Nick Jonas
Scott’s Review #762
Reviewed May 23, 2018
Grade: D
Goat (2016) is a film that made me angry during the duration of its one hour and forty minutes. I deride it completely.
Incorporating outrageous and unnecessary scenes for no other reason than to offend, the film fails to achieve either a lesson learned or any major point.
I understand what the filmmakers were going for by portraying fraternities as bad and their members as monsters. Goat never provided logic, much character development, or any good intentions.
I was left disturbed by what I had just seen.
College student Brad Land (Ben Schnetzer) is viciously attacked by two peers following a party one summer night. As the police search for the assailants, Brad begins the fall semester at a college attended by his older brother Brett (Nick Jonas).
There he decides to pledge a fraternity during “Hell week”, enduring one humiliation and degradation after another. When a fellow pledge dies following the fraternity’s abuse, someone rats the fraternity out with Brad as the likely suspect.
Brad is an interesting study. The protagonist makes his first mistake by giving ominous-looking strangers a lift home. At this point, we feel sympathy for the character and should root for him throughout the film, but I didn’t.
As nasty as the fraternity brothers are it is not until nearly the end that Brad ever stands up to any of them and he oddly refuses to point the finger at his assailant despite being right in the police lineup.
I found the character all over the place and never knew his motivations.
Most other characters (including the victimized pledges) have little rooting value and are mostly one-dimensional “frat boys” written poorly.
The writers of the script do their best to make fraternity brothers look awful- they beat, berate, humiliate, and degrade not only the pledges, but they barely treat females or animals any better.
This is disturbing to witness since there is little point. The humiliation scenes go on and on as if watching the same scene over again.
Ludicrous scenes of the guys drinking, acting belligerent, using anti-LGBT slurs, and taunting each other commenced almost from the get-go.
A ridiculous cameo by James Franco goes nowhere and makes little sense other than his character is a former frat boy the current members looked up to. If I had a nickel for every “bro”, “dude”, or “man” used in the film to show machismo I’d be a rich man.
In the final segment, the film makes a feeble effort to humanize Brett, who is hot and cold towards his brother all along (this is never explained).
They also write a few of the frat boys as feeling sorry for the sudden heart attack suffered by one of the pledges, but this only fueled me with rage as unknown was whether they were genuine or wanted to save their asses (they caused his death!).
My vote goes for the latter.
The only prop I will give to Goat is that a middling glossy Hollywood affair it is not, and goes for the jugular in its intensity and brutality.
But the point I thought the film was trying to make (that of a thought-provoking look at the problem of fraternities) only made me hate fraternities and develop a negative view of them.
From the despicable scenes where the frat feeds a poor goat chocolate laxatives and forces a blindfolded pledge to eat what’s thought to be excrement, to the concussion they give a pledge before he succumbs to a heart attack, the film is not an easy watch.
Too many scenes feel overly hammered home and redundant and the conclusion is completely unsatisfying. We are left with Brett and Brad gazing out at the spot where Brad was attacked and this scene does nothing to wrap up the film.
From the onset, I squirmed uncomfortably during Goat and never felt connected to the film or any of the characters.
Perhaps with more development and more of a purpose Goat (2016) might have been a success or appreciated more, but the film was a complete fail for me.
