The Incident (2011)

Directed by: Alexander Courtes

1989, Washington State.  In an asylum for the dangerously insane, George (Rupert Evans) leads a motley group of cooks who prepare, with varying degrees of care, food for the inmates, which they serve through a small hatch in a large, supposedly unbreakable window.  By night, George and the others are also a wannabe band.  Then, during a torrential storm, the power goes out, and suddenly the inmates are running amok.

There’s a scene in Saving Private Ryan (stay with me on this) where Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is trying to get his newest team member, Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies), ready for the mission by going through his vastly over-stuffed backpack.  “You won’t need this…you won’t need this…you’ll need that…not this…”.   

Director Courtes should have done something similar when going through the script of this mess of a movie.  Instead, time is wasted on things that are irrelevant (the fact that the cook/drummer didn’t turn up for a recording session) or that simply go nowhere (the absurdly visceral contents of a delivery of meat on the morning of the incident).  There are some effective scenes (including a couple that push the needle into the über-violence zone on the dial) but they are few and far between.  Unimpressive.