{"id":229,"date":"2013-01-07T12:03:24","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T17:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=229"},"modified":"2015-07-09T02:35:36","modified_gmt":"2015-07-09T06:35:36","slug":"atm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/atm\/","title":{"rendered":"ATM: The Worst Movie Ever to Come Out of the Worst Genre Ever (A Bunch of Dudes Stuck in a Room and They Don\u2019t Know Why)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ATMsmall\"
\n

\nATM (2012)
\n<\/strong>Directed by David Brooks
\nWritten by Chris Sparling
\n90 min.<\/p>\n

Warning: This review contains spoilers, but it doesn\u2019t matter, because this movie sucks.<\/i><\/p>\n

In ATM<\/i>, a guy parks his car about a hundred yards from an ATM for no reason.\u00a0 I guess just to make his friend walk really far in the freezing cold.\u00a0 What an asshole.\u00a0 Then, a few minutes later, after a bunch of stupid devices have conveniently put all three of our main characters in a glass-enclosed ATM together, they\u2019re afraid to exit because they see a guy 25 feet away wearing a coat. I\u2019m not kidding.\u00a0 They live in New York City, yet they\u2019re afraid of a guy, I guess, because he\u2019s wearing a coat.\u00a0 It literally just looks like he\u2019s waiting for them to leave so he can use the ATM.\u00a0 But then, to prove their illogical suspicions were actually correct, the coat guy suddenly murders a guy walking a dog. \u00a0 As it turns out, the coat guy is a weird murderer who stakes out people at ATMs.
\n
\nI generally strive to deconstruct and explain what makes a movie work and what I like or don\u2019t like about it. \u00a0In the case of ATM<\/i>, I have to blatantly say that it\u2019s the stupidest movie I\u2019ve ever seen.\u00a0 The devices used to get from point A to B (and the characters\u2019 reactions to said devices) are completely fucking illogical.<\/p>\n

ATM<\/i> falls under the genre of \u2018A Bunch of Dudes Stuck in a Room and They Don\u2019t Know Why\u2019. \u00a0Examples of this genre include Devil, Saw, Cube, Exam, <\/i>and Predators<\/i>. \u00a0The concept is fairly cool, because movies are supposed to take us places we could never possibly be, and no human being will ever wake up in a jumpsuit in a plain white room with four other people. \u00a0But the buck stops there because it\u2019s an inherently flawed genre.<\/p>\n

The only point to watching any of these movies is to find out the answer to a single question: Why the fuck are they in this goddamn room?\u00a0 But the answer to this question is always stupid and unsatisfying (or in the case of ATM<\/i>, so fucking stupid you won\u2019t even believe it) because these movies are driven by a premise<\/i> rather than by character arcs.<\/i><\/p>\n

Climaxes and resolutions are only ever satisfying when a hero truly achieves a goal.\u00a0 This goal may be obvious and overblown (like Luke blowing up the death star) or internal and subtle (like Ray Kinsella reconnecting with his Dad.)\u00a0 Both work because these are three-dimensional characters going through a transformation.<\/i><\/p>\n

The characters in \u2018roomies\u2019 (my nickname for these stuck-in-a-room movies) are all hollow, one-dimensional archetypes. \u00a0They are impossible to care about, and spend most of the film sounding like a broken record, yelling variations of \u201cwhy are we in this fucking room!?\u201d \u00a0Their only \u2018transformation\u2019 is that at the beginning, they don\u2019t know why they are in the room, and at the end, they do know why. \u00a0Assuming they live to the end.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in the mood to laugh at something that makes no sense and you can\u2019t believe exists, watch ATM. \u00a0<\/i>And, if you can think of other terrible \u2018roomies\u2019, leave them in the comments. \u00a0I\u2019d love to see them all.<\/p>\n

0 out of 1 stars.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"ATMsmall\"<\/p>\n

Warning: This review contains spoilers, but it doesn\u2019t matter, because this movie sucks.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[35,348,347,40,349,350,38,351,352,41,353,354,37,42,355,356,43,39,357,358,104,185,36,360,359],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-gregsreviews","tag-atm","tag-atm-movie","tag-atm-movie-review","tag-cube","tag-cube-movie","tag-cube-movie-review","tag-devil","tag-devil-movie","tag-devil-movie-review","tag-exam","tag-exam-movie","tag-exam-movie-review","tag-greg-deliso","tag-predators","tag-predators-movie","tag-predators-movie-review","tag-roomies","tag-saw","tag-saw-movie","tag-saw-movie-review","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-stuck-in-a-room","tag-worst-horror-movie-ever","tag-worst-movie-ever"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6329,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/6329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}