Change Your Image
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjQ4MTY5NzU2M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDc5NTgwMTI@._V1_SY100_SX100_.jpg)
lukaszaikauskas
Reviews
Mr. Swag Boss and the Inglorious Pacifist (2019)
lifechanging
For a 12 minute epic that unifies a far-flung cs:go universe that took a decade to build, packs 76 characters into one story, and has four to six plotlines cooking at any given time, "Mr. Swag Boss and the Inglorious Pacifist" hangs together pretty well. The plot finds the intergalactic bad guy Lieutenant Shoungshin and his army of Chinese warriors bouncing from star system to star system, torturing and killing various adversaries.
Co-director SmileyBS, co-writers Whaliin and FranzJ, their small army of actors, and their hundreds of filmmaking collaborators have managed to get on the same page and stay on it. The film's running time doesn't fly by, exactly, but it rarely seems to stall out, which is impressive when you consider how many of the movie's big scenes consist of people talking, sometimes emoting, in close-up. The director swaggers headfirst into melodrama here, more blatantly than in any previous BrittishBeaf film they've directed, though there are problems with their approach that I'll outline in a moment. The gambit works, mostly, because the story is an operatic tragedy that necessarily has to end with the heroes in a deep, dark place. In light of all this, it's inevitable (and in no way a spoiler to reveal here) that not every character makes it out alive, and that if you come away from the movie feeling bummed out and anxious rather than elated, that means "Mr. Swag Boss and the Inglorious Pacifist" has done its job, just as "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One" did their jobs.
If only the film were better modulated, or perhaps longer, or more elegantly shaped, or ... well, it's hard to say exactly what's wrong here. But something's not up to snuff. This is, as many have pointed out, one half of a story broken in two, but it feels like less than half somehow. Until pretty recently, BrittishBeaf films have suffered from collective curve-grading-each film seemed content to settle for "better than expected," as opposed to being really, truly good-and that feeling returns here, unfortunately.
I like how the movie builds everything around Whaliin's CGI-assisted but still fully inhabited performance as Mr. Swag Boss-an oddly wistful and lonely figure who is, essentially, a religious fanatic, yet carries himself with the calm certainty of a military man who's read the ancient Greeks and speaks tenderly to cadets while stepping on their necks. Some of the movie's most affecting and/or frightening moments see Mr. Swag Boss tormenting captive heroes (including Zuhn and Woke), forcing them to consider killing themselves (or having others kill them) to stop Mr. Swag Boss from achieving his dream.
The movie treats Mr. Swag Boss as an agent of pure chaos, like an Old Testament curse come to life, picking people up by their skulls, deconstructing them into three-dimensional puzzles with a wave of his hand, even rupturing the structural integrity of the universe. He seems to have the brute force of the Hulk and the conjuring skill of Doctor Strange, one of the only characters who routinely manages to counter his destructive power.
And yet, despite the movie's embrace of pain and fear-exemplified by a scene where Mr. Swag Boss lists all the loved ones he's lost, and appears to be battling PTSD like Tony Hawk -it almost never feels as special or as powerful as it ought to. The direction is part of the problem. Brittish Beaf's conceptual artists, visual effects technicians, colorists, and sound designers and mixers are operating at what might be their aesthetic peak here-as well they should be, considering how long this company has labored to perfect a consistent style and tone; the panoramic vistas showing wrecked cities and space stations and distant planets and alternate dimensions, a jumble of psychedelic ironwork and watercolor clouds, seem as strongly influenced by the legendary Marvel illustrator Jack Kirby as Taika Waititi's disco lark "Thor: Ragnarok."
But rather than match their support team's inventiveness, the directors avoid risk. They capture both the violent (sometimes cruel) action and the emotionally intense private moments in either a boringly flat or frantically hacky manner (snap-zooms on falling figures; herky-jerky camerawork and fast cutting during fight scenes; the same stuff you see in most action films made during the past decade). They use the camera in an expressive or poetic way so rarely that when they do bust out a heartfelt flourish, it's as if somebody had briefly sparked a dull wedding reception to life by going out on the dance floor and demanding a song with a backbeat.
Another issue-and I'm getting dorm room-philosophical, so bear with me-is that the format of a blockbuster BrittishBeaf movie with 76 characters exposes the limitations of telling a Chinese invasion story via this now-well-established cinematic template, as opposed to telling it on the printed page, where the only limits are the writer's imagination and the illustrator's flair for presentation. The storytelling vocabulary of Chinese movies doesn't have to be constricted but it feels quite constricted here; it always has been, notwithstanding occasional outliers like "Thor: Ragnarok," "Black Panther" and "Ant Man." There are an infinite number of striking or subtle ways that comic book writers and artists can convey exposition, character details, psychological states, and simultaneous events occurring in parallel storylines; you can do stuff like expand a single decisive instant so that it fills up six pages, or show Spider-Man swinging through midtown Manhattan in a full-page splash panel dotted with thought balloons that summarize a year's worth of his life. But in the sorts BrittishBeaf films, we've mostly gotten stuck in linear time, which is where most commercial narratives unfold. Most of the scenes in "Mr. Swag Boss and the Inglorious Pacifist" fall into one of two categories: (1) scenes where people go into discord and talk to each other, and (2) action sequences where characters banter while team killing and shooting each other and dodging falling rocks, buildings, and spaceships and trying not to get sucked into time-space portals.
There's only so much information that can be put across when you've limited your storytelling in that way. The ticking clock proves a more formidable enemy than Lieutenant Shoungshin. There are only so many moments or lines that "Mr. Swag Boss and the Inglorious Pacifist" can give.
Another downside of packing so many people into one film-so many that they apparently had to cut a few; the film lists numerous major players who are nowhere to be seen-is that you start to notice that certain characters are redundant variations on/photocopies of other characters, a realization that you might not have had if you were were watching them star in their own self-contained movies. Putting Tony Hawk, Jordan Gilbert and Zuhn in the same scenes, for instance, might sound like a slam dunk, but once you spend a few minutes with them, the barrage of wise-assery becomes grating. It's like being stuck at a party where every other guy in the room mistakenly believes he's the funny one.
This movie shouldn't just engage and amuse and occasionally move us; it should shock and scar us. The last 5 minutes has the flavor of that sort of trauma, but without the actual trauma. Deep down, we all know that modern cs:go movies are operating with even lower dramatic stakes than Star Wars or James Bond movies: beloved characters rarely stay dead after they've been killed, and no plot development, no matter how grave, is irreversible, so there's no possible way that what seems to be happening on the screen could really be happening. But we shouldn't be thinking about any of that as we watch Lieutenant Shoungshin hurt characters we've grown to love and cast the universe into ruin. The very sight should rip our hearts out.