Mr. Cranky's rating:
However, as Skip, the house husband, runs away on the weekends to whack other losers with his foam sword, you just wonder what in the hell his wife is thinking. Perhaps "what the hell did I do to my life?"
Darkon is a fantasy world where live adults pretend to be fantasy characters and run around parks in suburban Baltimore wailing on other fantasy characters with foam clubs and foam swords as they try to expand their realm.Effectively, "Darkon" the film is about two of these people, Skip Lipman and Kenyon Wells, and how their conflict within the Darkon realm defines them as people. Skip is a stay-at-home dad (read: loser) whose character, Bannor, leads Laconia against Keldar's (Wells) Mordom. Laconia is a small realm while Mordom is the largest of the realms. Laconia is trying to seize power while Mordom is trying to retain their power and expand. Wells, incidentally, is some kind of businessman in real life though the film is vague about what he does, just that he has an office. It could be in a "Staples" for all I know and his final professional advancement could be from floor manager to administrative assistant. And he has Darkon to thank for it!Having established this rather thin picture of a couple of the participants within Darkon, directors Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel, rather unfortunately, decide to base the narrative thread of their movie on the fantasy conflict between Bannor and Keldar rather than trying to work out what it is that makes Darkon filled with more loser geeks this side of a renaissance festival. Of course, they do spend some time trying to figure that out, but it's resolved by more than one participant explaining that they can be somebody in Darkon they can't be in the real world. Wow, really?"Darkon" is just so damn depressing. I mean, the participants, by and large - and as one recent "Survivor" contestant put it so eloquently - suck at life. So here they are running around with foam sticks whacking each other on their fake shields to develop a sense of pride and self-esteem. I mean, for Christ's sake, the directors focus on one single mother and former stripper who lives with her parents. At least find one person who's moved out of their mom's basement and isn't a stay-at-home dad for the love of god. The directors delve into these people's psyches no more, undoubtedly afraid that doing so will render their movie utterly neutered. However, as Skip, the house husband, runs away on the weekends to whack other losers with his foam sword, you just wonder what in the hell his wife is thinking. Perhaps "what the hell did I do to my life?"Ultimately, the film betrays the people in it or else I wouldn't be able to be so fucking mean. I imagine there's a lot more of a sense of community in Darkon than Meyer and Neel reveal and had they not decided to try to forge drama from the largely uninteresting, disconnected conflict between Bannor and Keldar, "Darkon" might have achieved something.
Was it really that bad?
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