My Thoughts On The Mean One
The Mean One takes something familiar - the Grinch - and turns it into a horror movie, and even though I knew it probably wouldn't be that good, I was curious, as I always am with these kind of films, and hopes it would be somewhat fun.
And right away, I could tell this certainly wasn’t going to be a polished ride, where the opening scene lands hard, and not in a good way, and I was wondering if it was aiming for camp, or if it actually wanted to be genuine, and the final is messy.
It’s difficult to settle into any rhythm because the film keeps shifting gears, often mid-scene, where Cindy, the central character, is meant to carry the weight of this story, but you never feel connected to her at all.
She’s almost entirely defined by her trauma, but the script doesn’t give her much else, and even in moments that are supposed to be emotional or tense, it all falls flat, and the story just never really gets going in any meaningful, or fun way.
The film is very heavily reliant is on CGI, and not in a clever way, as the blood and gore feel incredibly cartoonish, and there’s a moment with some CGI fish that is so poorly rendered it made me laugh, and while I get that low-budget horror can lean into its limitations, but here it just feels lazy, and it pulls you out of the story every time, and that’s frustrating because there are ideas in the story that could have been interesting if they were handled with a bit more care.
The pacing also annoyed me, where scenes start and stop abruptly, and the story often feels like it’s wandering in circles, and subplots appear only to vanish moments later, and then there’s The Mean One himself.
We get glimpses of threat, but not much, and the reliance on digital gore doesn’t help either - kills are uninspired, the blood is fake-looking, and the horror set pieces lack any rhythm or flair - with very little tension building either.
But it does hint at the story it wants to tell - Cindy’s arc, the town’s fear, the sense of someone coming back to confront a personal nightmare - these are elements that could make for something somewhat interesting, but the movie rarely takes the time to explore them, and just rushes from one scene to the next, like a checklist of horror tropes.
The acting is also very awkward, where some characters are completely over the top, while others are flat, and Cindy sits somewhere in the middle.
I didn’t hate her entirely but the writing and performance never fully sell her strength or her trauma, and moments that should have landed emotionally didn’t, and by the middle of the film, you are more focused on how the movie was constructed than on what was happening to the characters.
The Mean One is a frustrating experience. I appreciated the concept, and I wanted it to be a fun twisted take, but I struggles with it a lot, even in a trashy fun way, as even the scenes that might have been genuinely entertaining feel undone by the execution.
Even David Howard Thornton can't save this, but oh well, they tried.
[The Mean One on IMDB] [Where to watch The Mean One]
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