Brett Leonard’s film, ‘Feed’ is amalgamations of so many films, we here at ATBTS lost count. Almost everything is stolen (presumably). Actually, every angle, every edit, and every line of dialogue can be traced to its roots in some other movie. And trust me, even if it can’t, we’ll find a connection. So, let’s start with the plot …
Jack Thompson plays Richard, an Australian cop just like in ‘The Road Warrior’, who works for Interpol, I guess. This affords him exciting vacations all over the world where he arrests people in different color-timed scenes just like in ‘Traffic’. He also leads some sort of cyber-crimes division where he uses computers to catch criminals just like in another Brett Leonard film, ‘Virtuosity’. So, Officer Richard scans the interwebs looking at porn just like in ‘American Pie’, until one day he decides he should probably catch Michael Carter (Alex O'Loughlin), the man responsible for FeederX.com, a website where grotesquely obese women are force-fed and killed.
Carter associates these women in really bad fat suits (‘The Klumps’) with his large mother (‘What's Eating Gilbert Grape’) and simply wants to share videos of them with people who then bet on how long they’ll live, potentially affecting the outcome just like in ‘Untraceable’. Wait, that came out after this movie. Damn. Alright, it’s like ‘Caddyshack’. Since there was betting in both, it’s the same.
Wunder Cop Richard jaunts off to the exciting and dangerous underbelly of Toledo, Ohio to confront Carter and arrest him in a slightly yellow-toned sequence. But, we find out that Officer Richard is only after Michael Carter, the tattooed (‘Cape Fear’) killer (‘Clue’) because he locks up women and then force-feeds them while jerking off (‘The Care Bears Movie’). It really is your typical model for the inappropriate and illegal use of police powers to coerce, harass, intimidate, arrest, assault and kill members of our community. It makes me sick to think of these cops, going about punishing the guilty at will.
Anyway, while Officer Richard is abusing his power, O'Loughlin’s character dances (‘Dances With Wolves’) between Keanu Reeves’ villain from ‘The Watcher’ and Rick Moranis’ blood-thirsty, kill-crazy, soulless, indestructible death machine from ‘Little Shop of Horrors’. But don’t worry, his reasoning for committing these atrocities is wrapped up in the deconstruction and unraveling of social norms, just like the killer in ‘Se7en’ so it’s ok. Oh, and he has mother issues just like Norman Bates in ‘Psycho’. Also, both cop and criminal have a terrifying secret just like in ‘Insomnia’, and they enter into a game of cat and mouse just like in ‘Mouse Hunt’.
The whole point of this movie is to generate a loose, underlying social statement that there are many different kinds of love and what may seem strange, perverted, illegal, or murderously insane to us, may be perfectly innocent and intimate to others, unless you’re a cop, or a judge, or a lawyer, or human. I suppose we’re meant to step back and see whom the monster in the mirror really is (society for imposing such harsh criteria for “true beauty” on innocent women, or the man forcing a feeding tube down a 600 lb woman’s throat while masturbating in a vat of tomato sauce) but it’s lost on me. Leonard also tries to link this movie to real facts in some attempt to…show legitimacy of his theme? I don't know.
Regardless, I suppose the power struggle between the two characters continues up until the dizzying conclusion just like it did in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ or ‘Superman’, but I really don’t care.
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