The lowest humour imaginable coupled with scenes of gratuitous violence, posing as satire. But it isn't. It's a cheap exploitation film with plenty of juicy garbage for audiences willing to gobble it up. Not a hint of artistic ambition here. People who love this film simply enjoy the violence and the revolting humour in it, and not even they would honestly say they enjoy some satirical message in it. If they were honest. I mean, what satire is there? That hooligans who would have ended up in street gangs anyhow got an opportunity to take it to an even higher level in the 1990s? That society was in agony? Well, we know that. But none of us were criminals or even wanted to be criminals. The fate of these two teenagers does not speak to me in any meaningful way. I had entirely different concerns back in the 1990s. And then there is that revolting trope that the urban 'elite' in Belgrade still loves to push, namely that the war in Yugoslavia was nothing but an opportunity for criminals to get rich. For the director of this film, none of the brave volunteers who died or got crippled in the war exist. Only a criminal who looted a village and picked up a Versace suit at someone's home. How disrespectful and how cynical is that? This film reeks of cynicism, while trying to present itself as a moral story in which we ought to feel sorry for the protagonists. No, this film feels sorry for no one. It revels in brutality, cynicism, and lowly humour. And it has the nerve to insist it is 'satire'...
Review of The Wounds
