Director: Adam Rifkin
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 95 min.
Back in 2012, director Adam Rifkin created an eight-episode miniseries on Showtime titled Reality Show, a found-footage-style dark comedy attempting to deconstruct everything that makes a modern “reality” show popular and wag a condescending finger at the poisonous, and often lascivious, nature of these shows.
Now, the series has been truncated into a condensed 90-minute movie version, called Shooting the Warwicks, but it makes one wonder if criticizing these programs is nearly as worn out as the shows themselves.
We’ve seen the topic broached several times cinematically before, from The Truman Show to Series 7: The Contenders. The concept of reality TV and the social and moral implications that this type of entertainment raises has been in the modern vernacular for years, so another film tackling the subject feels dated, especially when it’s been done better.
The film revolves around a television producer, played by Rifkin, who pitches an idea to create a new reality show about a family, shown in their natural habitat but filmed without their knowledge. Hidden cameras would be placed throughout their home, work and school, and they would have no idea they are the subjects of a show. With no idea that cameras are in place, the Warwick family would act truly real. Naturally, the network loves it, and the show commences.
The problem is, it turns out real life isn’t very dramatic or entertaining for most people, so after some pressuring, the producers begin causing conflict within the lives of the Warwicks. It’s only small things at first, but the interfering gradually escalates to a violent and disturbing conclusion.
Visually, the film looks more like a late-night Cinemax skin flick than an actual movie, with about as much simulated sex. There are random transitions that freeze frame, turn black and white and zoom in, an effect that is supposed to simulate the low-quality TV show vibe, but the end result is a low-quality movie vibe. Combine that with an awkward rewind effect that periodically occurs and the overall look of Shooting the Warwicks is unpleasant to say the least.
As with most found-footage movies, this one falls for the same logical and technical pitfalls as so many others, with cameras placed in plain-view areas that would be impossible not to see, shots that simply couldn’t happen in a candid fashion and perfect sound capture everywhere, even though no one is wearing microphones.
Many of the scenes take place in the daughter’s school, which is also fully rigged with cameras everywhere. How did they manage to get these cameras in so many places throughout the school? Even if the show itself manages to be somehow legal, how would placing hidden cameras all through a school be at all legal in any way?
At one point they get an actor to pose as a high-school student in order to befriend, and subsequently seduce, the daughter. How did this happen? Are the people at this school so idiotic that they would enroll a twenty-something into their school as a student without checking into it at all?
As ridiculous as all this is, Rifkin does successfully critique the voyeuristic, yet manipulative, world of reality TV, by horrifically blowing it out of proportion. If you ever wondered how The Truman Show may have ended up if Truman didn’t have a perfect life, than this is the worst-case scenario.
It’s a mean-spirited film that continuously outdoes itself in a crazy race to achieve the darkest resolution possible. And boy, does this movie get dark. It satirizes the depths to which network “suits” are willing to stoop in order to achieve higher ratings, at the expense of those actually harmed by the show.
Classified as a comedy by its distributor for some reason, Shooting the Warwicks is a pitch-black story about the perils of reality TV, a topic that may have been relevant a decade ago but now just feels played out, partially due to its found-footage style.
If you’re in the mood to watch the reality show concept get ripped to shreds, I would instead recommend The Onion’s Sex House series, which also gets incredibly dark, or E’s Burning Love, for a tongue-in-cheek parody of shameless, drama-generating shows like The Bachelor.
