Patrick Stewart’s Green Room Is Free to Stream on Tubi

The late Patrick Stewart built much of his reputation playing distinctive heroes. His Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the Professor Charles Xavier of the Fox X-Men films were both idealists, even if they pursued their ideals in different ways. (apnews.com)

Those roles helped establish Stewart as a benevolent authority figure in popular culture. He sometimes played against that image, appearing on Extras as a depraved version of himself and voicing the similarly outrageous Avery Bullock on American Dad. His gravitas also earned him plenty of roles as kings, leaders, and heroes.

Villains were much rarer. Although Stewart played Shylock and Macbeth onstage, he had relatively few outright antagonist roles in film and television. A notable exception came in Jeremy Saulnier’s 2015 rural thriller Green Room, in which Stewart plays a neo-Nazi drug lord with the same focus and intensity he brought to his heroic parts.

Anyone interested in seeing what may be Stewart’s most evil performance can stream Green Room for free on Tubi. (tubitv.com)

You’ll be the first to go unless you think

The Ain’t Rights are a struggling punk band touring the Pacific Northwest, getting by on bar gigs, free food, and siphoned gas. Short of money, they accept a booking at an isolated bar in rural Oregon. The venue turns out to be a skinhead hangout, and the band has been hired to open for a Nazi metal group.

The evening gets worse when the Ain’t Rights return to the backstage green room and accidentally witness a murder. The bar’s staff take them prisoner and call the owner, played by Stewart. He decides to kill everyone involved. With little experience of violence, the band members must fight their way out to survive the night.

The first word that comes to mind about Green Room is “grimy.” The Ain’t Rights live a hard life of petty theft, couch-surfing, and dive bars. Even before they reach the skinheads’ bar, the film feels coated in dirt and dried sweat. Buildings look ready to collapse after one good kick, and the lighting makes people look like corpses.

Once the film gathers momentum, it becomes brutal. Major characters die with little ceremony, while survivors quickly accumulate crippling injuries. The makeup crew depicts shredded throats and severed limbs in graphic detail. Be prepared for an intense watch.

Like some of Saulnier’s other films, including 2007’s Murder Party, Green Room works as an “inaction” movie. Its characters are not especially good at fighting, but they have no choice. They rely on improvised weapons and desperate plans while struggling through injuries and sudden shocks. One scene centers on the effort to find and use a single unexpended shotgun shell.

Stewart becomes the film’s anchor in a role built around the banality of evil. His character, Darcy, treats his actions as ordinary business. He runs a skinhead bar that serves as a hub for the local drug trade, and he is content to make innocent people disappear when it suits him. It takes a moment to adjust to Stewart as the villain, but Darcy soon emerges as a casual, everyday monster.

Source: Polygon