Sometimes movies disappoint us by failing to live up to our expectations for them. Others, they disappoint us through sheer badness alone. Stephen McCallum’s “1%” disappoints us through wasted promise, threatening to take an interesting angle on biker gang film tropes before totally chickening out and playing the hits instead. If you’ve ever seen a season of “Sons of Anarchy,” you more or less know what you’re going to get out of “1%,” and if “Sons of Anarchy” is your cup of vodka and orange juice, then you’ll probably enjoy McCallum’s work on its own terms. But it’s nothing short of frustrating to see genre movies stick with what we know works instead of trying anything new, and in that regard “1%” is an entirely frustrating experience.
McCallum’s premise is Shakespearean in nature; the film is set in the world of an outlaw biker club, hence the title, “1%” being a slang appellation for lawlessness itself. The club’s president, Knuck (Matt Nable, McCallum’s screenwriter), is on the cusp of finishing his three year prison sentence, ready to return home and take the reins back from his aide de camp and surrogate son Mark (Ryan Corr). Mark’s been running the club in Knuck’s absence, seeking ways to make the gang legit — turns out he’d rather be part of the 99% than the 1% — so of course Knuck’s imminent freedom poses problems for Mark, for his power-hungry wife, Katrina (Abbey Lee), for Mark’s handicapped brother, Skink (Josh McConville), and for the club itself. Knuck wants to return to doing things the way they’ve always been done. Mark mostly wants to protect Skink. We want to see McCallum’s fascination with performed masculinity go literally anywhere, but it doesn’t.
Knuck is a complicated figure: he’s in jail for good reason, and while in jail he develops “a taste” for men, as his own wife, Hayley (Simone Kessell), puts it later on in the film. “1%” doesn’t do much with this other than treat Knuck’s sexual plasticity as a plot device, but briefly, as he sits in the waiting room for a meeting with Mark, we see a flash of what looks like male insecurity: he flexes his considerable muscles, puffing out as Hayley simultaneously teases and encourages his display of dominance. For a moment, “1%” is a power struggle that occurs beneath the surface of its participants, but the moment is too brief even to be called fleeting. The film quickly discards its own subtext in favor of just text — loud, bloody, prototypically macho text loaded with a grim, internalized misogyny.
Not lightly is the Shakespeare reference made; you get the sense that Katrina and Hayley are big fans of Lady Macbeth and her lust for power. Most of the movie’s significant story developments result from their manipulations, their taunts, their conniving; when conspiracy and intimidation won’t do, McCallum turns to Skink, using him as a plot device akin to an easily confused bull in a china shop. If McCallum wants to advance Katrina’s plan for wresting control over the club from Knuck, he just has her lie to Skink. If he needs artificial conflict to keep the film from sagging, he tricks poor Skink into breaking the club’s rules. Skink is the grease that keeps the wheels on “1%” spinning. It’s bad enough that the film’s women are given no shading and are characterized only by their scheming. Skink’s characterization as a simple minded chess piece is just over the line of insulting.
There’s texture to “1%,” at least, that gives the film a hands-on sensibility, a grounded aesthetic that lets its displays of unhinged violence and vulgar inhumanity hit hard enough to stir up our emotions. “Visceral” isn’t the right way to put it. That would suggest a more experiential movie than “1%” actually is. Instead, it’s carefully orchestrated and dressed up, calibrated to maximize the impact of its physical qualities. We begin with Skink walking down a quiet residential street, blood dripping from his nose and his mouth, as he cries out Mark’s name; we continue with men being shot dead and buried in shallow graves, with club initiates being brutalized by the crew as a price of admission (and later, brutalized by Knuck, victims of his sexual predations), and with hails of gunfire as McCallum’s web of betrayals comes unraveled and all his characters have left is the harsh, explosive release of a shotgun trigger.
You won’t leave “1%” unshaken or unscathed. You also won’t leave having seen the biker genre given new life, or at least the benefit of a new set of eyes. McCallum misses opportunities to say what normally isn’t said in media driven by brutish manhood, and maybe this is fine: He doesn’t have to say those things if he doesn’t want to, or if he’s unequipped to. But the artistic quality of “1%” is felt well enough that the absence of greater depth beyond the thrills of carnage is felt, too. We can hear the wishes and wants of the film’s characters pushing against the film’s seams; there’s a nuance at play that McCallum leaves unexplored, a “why” motivating Mark and Knuck, Katrina and Hayley that would only have benefitted the film if allowed to breathe.
A shame, but maybe McCallum is exactly what Knuck believes Mark to be: a pretender, a person who loves the accoutrements of biker gang culture, the clothes and the bikes, but lacks the grit to embody the biker spirit. That’s fine too. It takes a special kind of someone to rule over a group of criminals through naught but force of arms. But it takes a special kind of film to make that kind of person, and that kind of narrative, feel fresh. “1%” isn’t that film. [D+]
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