Talking About Bruno #2 Midnight in the Switchgrass Is a Dreary Downer with Bruce Willis, Machine Gun Kelly, Megan Fox and a Morbidly Fascinating Bad Guy Turn from Lukas Haas (2021)
One of the defining qualities of Bruce Willis’ late period films is a staggering lack of star power. Usually it’s just Bruce Willis for the day (so use that time wisely!) and Frank Grillo or Chad Michael Murray as the actual lead.
By those standards, 2021’s Midnight in the Switchgrass offers a goddamn cornucopia of stars. Compared to the other SIX films he released that year Midnight in the Sweetgrass is goddamn It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, only with five reasonably priced stars instead of every famous funny person in the world.
In addition to Willis, whose role as FBI agent Karl Helter embodies the 3Ss of his 2021 output—sleepy, small and sedentary—Midnight in the Switchgrass stars America’s Sweethearts, Megan Fox and musician Machine Gun Kelly.
Megan Fox and Mr. Gun Kelly, the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee of the Covid era, whose non-stop, extensively documented PDAs give us lowly common people a reason to keep going, join forces as a tough FBI agent who uses her body and beauty to lure deranged criminals and a lowlife scumbag with an abundance of neck tattoos.
Fox and the man born Colson Baker met on the set of Midnight in the Switchgrass. That makes this a film of historic importance on par with The Jazz Singer, Gone with the Wind, Easy Rider, Bonnie & Clyde and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Without it, Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox might never have met and fallen in love and then where would we be as a society? We’d have nothing to occupy our lives but our families, careers, personal lives and every other celebrity and celebrity couple.
They should call him Machine Gun Smelly because he thinks this movie stinks!
But that wouldn’t be enough, and mass suicides would ensue as we fruitlessly tried to fill the Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox-as-a couple shaped hole in our hearts with drugs and alcohol and sexual experimentation before ultimately giving up and committing suicide.
So even though Midnight in the Switchgrass might not be up there with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in the pantheon of great American films it nevertheless has served an incredibly useful role in keeping society functioning during an unprecedented pandemic.
Ah, but Midnight in the Switchgrass wouldn’t be the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of movies Bruce Willis released in 2021 if it only starred Bruce Willis and the dynamic duo of Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox.
America’s scuzzy sweethearts Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox
Boasting more stars then there are in the heavens, Midnight in the Sweetgrass also stars Emile Hirsch as a lawman who gets too close to his case, solid journeyman character actor Michael Beach and Lukas Haas in the all-important role of Peter, a doting father and husband who lives a secret double life as a torturer, rapist and ultimately mass murderer/serial killer of sex workers.
Peter is based on real-life killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who was unaffectionately known as The Truck Stop Killer because he targeted hitchhikers and truck stop sex workers during a long, sadistic killing spree. Haas’ exemplar of pure evil keeps his wholesome home life as a husband and father separate from his unsavory existence as one of the most depraved fucks in the history of the universe.
His adorable daughter and admiring wife, for example, are forbidden from ever wandering into Daddy’s Murder and Torture Barn. It’s off limits. Because of all the murder and torture that daddy has been doing in it. It is NOT kid-friendly in the least, mostly because of the drugged, bound, terrified teenagers begging tearfully and unsuccessfully for their lives.
Megan Fox stars as Rebecca Lombardi, a tough as nails FBI agent who puts her life and her body on the line by posing as a sex worker in order to crack a sex trafficking ring.
Willis takes it easy and remains seated as her veteran partner Karl Helter, who is onscreen for the requisite fifteen minutes and expresses grandfatherly concern for his partner and the dangerous risks she’s taking.
Troubled human being Emile Hirsch costars as a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent on the hunt for a serial killer murdering underage sex workers throughout Florida. Just like Mark in The Room, Hirsch has a babyface but he’s given a mustache here that’s supposed to make him look tougher and older but instead just makes him look like a child with unflattering facial hair.
The events that Midnight in the Switchgrass depict took place in Texas but the film instead takes place in Pensacola because Texas just wasn’t sleazy and sordid enough for its needs. Besides, Texas doesn’t have much local color or personality so there’s no point setting films there.
To say that I did not enjoy Midnight in the Switchgrass would be a wild understatement. It is unrelentingly, uncompromisingly grim and lurid, an extended wall in the depths of human depravity and unconscionable cruelty.
I can’t recall a single moment of levity or humor in it, even of the exceedingly dark variety. To be honest, it was so depressing and violent that I wanted to stop watching but I kept at it for two solid reasons.
I knew I had to finish watching the movie and then five more in order to successfully complete my A Year in the Life of Bruce Willis project and I want to see this thing through to the bitter end so I persevered despite my visceral distaste for pretty much everything involving Haas’ monster of a mass murderer, which is pretty much half the film.
Here’s the thing: Midnight in the Switchgrass is not supposed to be fun. It’s not supposed to be funny. It’s not even supposed to be particularly entertaining, unless you happen to be a sick fuck who gets off on seeing vulnerable sex workers being tortured and physically and emotionally abused.
I don’t want to virtue signal or anything, but I don’t get off on that kind of sick shit. I prefer non-sick shit like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to the point where it is physically hard for me to even watch this kind of ugliness and brutality.
Midnight in the Switchgrass is supposed to be disturbing and viscerally unnerving. It succeeds wildly in that respect thanks largely to Haas’ skin-crawling turn as the worst, most vicious person in the history of the world. It’s perversely dedicated to being as unpleasant as humanly possible. It’s even bleaker than a lurid psychodrama about someone known as the Truck Stop Killer has any right to be.
After watching Midnight in the Switchgrass, I felt like I had to take a long, hot shower to purge myself of its all-consuming scuzziness. Haas dominates the proceedings to the point that I forgot that Willis was even in the movie for extended stretches and that’s the whole reasons I’m subjecting myself to these abominations.
There was a time when Willis wouldn’t even think of lowering himself to appearing in this kind of lurid trash yet it towers over the rest of Willis’ 2021 output in star-power and visibility, in the sense that some people seem vaguely aware that the movie exists, which is more than can be said of the other six movies he made that year of furious productivity.
Machine Gun Kelly represents a big step up from the rest of Willis’ 2021 costars.
Don’t watch Midnight in the Switchgrass. It’s no damn fun at all and Willis is barely in it. Instead do yourself a favor and re-watch It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I know some people say it’s over-rated, heavy-handed, not funny and that Stanley Kramer was the worst possible director for the material but I think it holds up.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is twice as long as Midnight in the Switchgrass but it nevertheless feels much shorter than this dour dud.
Two Brunos on a 1 to 5 Bruno scale
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out and it is magnificent!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!