Director Hates Stupidity, Hypocrisy and Critics

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Apparently fed up with the traditional system of film distribution — and in particular with the critics who insist, out of spite or inertia, on reviewing whatever opens in theaters — Kevin Smith is taking his new movie, “Red State,” directly to its audience. The film, which was shown at the Sundance Film Festival last January, has been available for home viewing since Sept. 1, via cable television, iTunes and other platforms. For those who insist on seeing it the old-fashioned way, on a big screen from an upholstered seat with a cup holder attached to the arm, there will be screenings in select cities on Sunday night, with Mr. Smith making an appearance to do what he does best, which is rant, tell stories and shoot the breeze with his fans.

Anyone who has seen him live, listened to his “SModcasts” or watched the extraordinary YouTube video in which he recounts his ill-starred involvement with a Hollywood superhero franchise knows that Mr. Smith is a funny, inexhaustible and frequently brilliant talker, as well as a genius at Twitter. (His garrulity is part of the joke of his onscreen Silent Bob persona.) His films are often riffs and arguments carried out by other means.

At their best, they are not so much coherently structured stories as visual downloads of whatever happens to be on the director’s mind. His forays into conventional genres — “Chasing Amy,” “Jersey Girl,” the dispiritingly well-titled “Cop Out” — are rarely as interesting as his more free-form exercises in animus and provocation. “Clerks 2” and “Dogma,” for instance, may not satisfy any cinephile standards of aesthetic distinction, but those are precisely the wrong standards to apply. The movies are full of rage, life and humor, and to find fault with their sloppy editing or awkward performances is to miss the point.

There is no danger of that with “Red State,” an ideological horror-action movie with abundant bloodshed and some crisply edited flurries of gunplay. It gives a gruesome literalness to the tired idea of a culture war, turning bellicose rhetoric into actual murder.

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But for all its boisterous profanity and splattery violence, the film is more of a weary sigh than a sputtering volley of indignation. Mr. Smith is incensed by religious intolerance and by the abuse of state power, but mostly he is fed up with the hypocrisy, meanness and plain stupidity that seem to infect every corner of contemporary American life. I can’t argue with his impatience, but I do wish he had found a more cogent, less chaotic way of expressing it.

The end credits divide the characters in “Red State” — set in a small Southern town and populated by a bunch of talented and good-humored actors — into three categories: Sex, Religion and Politics. Sex is embodied by a trio of horny young men (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) who are familiar Kevin Smith types. Foul-mouthed and obsessed with female anatomy, they are also fundamentally silly and innocent, more prey than predators.

And prey is what they turn out to be once they fall into the clutches of Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), the silver-maned, silver-tongued pastor of a fanatical fundamentalist church. Not content to picket funerals in the manner of Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church (which is name-checked in the “Red State” screenplay), Abin and his congregants conduct grisly modern-day human sacrifices, appeasing their angry god by killing gay men. That does not quite characterize the three teenagers, who have been lured by the promise of sex with Abin’s middle-aged daughter Sara (Melissa Leo), but Abin is sure there is a place in hell for them too.

That takes care of sex and religion. Politics arrives first in the person of the hapless, closeted local sheriff (Stephen Root) and then in the more decisive form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The bureau’s siege of Abin’s compound, which is full of guns and children, queasily recalls Waco in 1993, with an extra post-Sept. 11 twist once the feds define the preacher and his congregants as terrorists. The potential for calamity is clear to an A.T.F. special agent (John Goodman) who serves as the film’s lone and largely impotent voice of reason.

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“There’s no limit to what people will do when they feel entitled,” he says, and what “Red State” ultimately espouses is less a political ideology than a tragic view of human nature. The problem is that the movie Mr. Smith has made is, for the most part, a loud and unconvincing vehicle for this view, swerving between horror and satire without being quite sharp or scary enough.

What “Red State” does best, unsurprisingly, is talk. Mr. Parks, as a weirdly gentle psychopath, and Mr. Goodman, as a rumpled avatar of bureaucratic decency, are each able to weave a verbal spell out of Mr. Smith’s words. Their performances — along with Ms. Leo’s — give the film a measure of dramatic gravity. All of which may make you wish for less mayhem and less noise. Come to think of it, Mr. Smith might just wish for the same thing.

“Red State” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Blue language and crimson gore.

RED STATE

Screens on Sunday in select theaters nationwide; also available through video-on-demand.

Written, directed and edited by Kevin Smith; director of photography, David Klein; production design by Cabot McMullen; costumes by Beth Pasternak; produced by Jonathan Gordon; released by D Squared Films and SModcast. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.

WITH: Michael Angarano (Travis), Kerry Bishé (Cheyenne), Nicholas Braun (Billy-Ray), Kyle Gallner (Jarod), Ronnie Connell (Randy), John Goodman (Joseph Keenan), Melissa Leo (Sara), Michael Parks (Abin Cooper), Kevin Pollak (ASAC Brooks) and Stephen Root (Sheriff Wynan).