Stuart Gordon's King of the Ants is a Nifty, Nasty Neo-Noir Rooted in the Inexorable Horror of the Human Condition
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Stuart Gordon is rightly revered as that most glorious of creatures—the frightmaster—but he did a whole lot more than scare the bejesus out of people with bogeymen and women of various stripes.
Gordon directed a terrific family film in 1998’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and went mainstream in a big way with the rousing 1992 science fiction adventure Fortress in addition to working on the screenplay for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Most notably Gordon ended his career as a film director with a trilogy of tough Neo-Noirs about desperate strivers and the horror of the human condition. 2003’s King of Ants, the 2005 David Mamet adaptation Edmond and 2007’s Stuck are all horror films in an abstract.
They’re about the ugliness of capitalism and the way its savage iniquities bring out the worst in people, how it turns them into monsters callous to the suffering of others and concerned only with their own survival.
King of the Ants is the earliest, slightest and least of this twisted trilogy. It found Gordon working with notorious schlock factory and dedicated knock-off artists The Asylum on one of their first and best productions.
Gordon’s nasty nugget boasts a level of quality and ambition unusual for The Asylum, although, to be fair, they hadn’t yet branded themselves aggressively as comically mercenary and shameless bottom feeders.
King of the Ants is wildly ambitious by Asylum standards in that the veteran filmmaker and master storyteller wanted to make a genuine film that would engage and entertain audiences instead of tricking the slow-witted and easily confused with mock-busters like Snakes on a Train, Pirates of Treasure Island, Transmorphers and of course Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus.
King of the Ants similarly has a literary pedigree that sets it apart from Asylum productions such as Attack of the Meth Gator and Top Gunner: Danger Zone. King of the Ants is an adaptation of a hardboiled novel of the same name by British actor, comedian, musician and author Charlie Higson about Sean Crawley (Chris Messina), an all-too-relatable fuck up who has accomplished seemingly nothing in an almost impressively unimpressive life.
He seems content to drift aimless through life, doing just enough to get by until he meets Duke Wayne (George Wendt), a low-level criminal flunky whose affable exterior masks a quick temper and propensity for violent rage.
Norm!
Wendt’s relationship with Gordon pre-dates his Cheers years and stretches all the way back to their early theater days in Chicago working on plays like Bleacher Bums. Gordon knew better than anyone what Wendt was capable of.
The world might look at Wendt and see a likable alcoholic but Gordon knew that he was also a talented and versatile character actor who could be absolutely chilling in the right role.
King of the Ants boldly and very effectively casts Wendt against type as a monster of banality who is only as nice and civil as he absolutely has to be in order to realize his sinister objectives. Once he has what he wants the mask slides off instantly and the ugliness comes out.
Duke introduces Sean to his boss Ray Matthews (Daniel Baldwin). Baldwin establishes Ray as a worthy entry in the great pantheon of Stuart Gordon villains with a monologue, delivered in a single take, that indelibly establishes what kind of a man Ray is and why Sean should get the hell out while he still can.
Ray entertains Sean with a repulsive monologue about an extramarital tryst with an eighteen year old secretary he assures us looked thirteen that was interrupted by the angry demands of a yapping pooch. Ray first drop kicks the offensive canine but when that does not work he snaps his neck like a twig.
It’s a lovingly delivered speech that tells us everything we need to know about this horrible man and how he sees the world. For Ray, Sean is just another pawn to be used to his advantage and then killed or kicked when he no longer serves any useful purpose.
Baldwin has a monologue nearly as unforgettable in its nastiness later in the film about a lady’s man they used to hang out with whose days of wooing beautiful dames came to an early and unfortunate end when he incurred brain damage that left him a shell of a man.
For the larger than life bad guy, played by the largest and most overtly sinister Baldwin, these are just funny stories with an important message about how if people don’t do what he says they’ll die or wish they were dead.
The big man finally comes around to the point. How would he like FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS just to kill a man? Baldwin asks the question with a hilariously unjustified gleam in in his eyes that suggests that Sean won’t even be able to contemplate being paid such a massive sum just to break every law known to man in a way that could very likely lead to his death and/or being brutalized for decades in prison.
Sean understandably says that five thousand dollars is not a whole lot of money. He counter-offers fifteen thousand dollars and they settle on thirteen.
Any time you put a number on A human life you implicitly put a number of every human life. In King of Ants that number is insultingly low because human life is not valued in its world, particularly the lives of the poor, the criminal and the desperate.
To drive home the hopelessness and futility of our anti-hero’s criminal career, once Sean commits the homicide his criminal bosses have absolutely no interest in paying him even the modest, even insultingly low sum they had agreed upon beforehand.
These heartless sadists stop just short of torturing Sean to death but he eventually escapes and has an unlikely yet oddly poignant romance with the widow of the good man he killed. King of the Ants suggests Douglas Sirk by way of John Woo with this subplot, which should feel wildly melodramatic yet instead registers as deeply sad and oddly philosophical.
Gordon eschews overt stylization to create a daylight Neo-Noir that chooses to tell an archetypal story of sin, redemption and revenge in a manner brutal and engaging.
King of Ants understands that you don’t need ANY flash when you’ve got the goods, just a story worth telling and the right collaborators for the job.
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