Review of Mayhem (2017) by John M — 23 Jan 2018

I like to imagine that this is what Glenn was doing pre-Walking Dead. So this is about a virus that causes people to give into their dark side, essentially turning its subjects into coke addicts with no impulse control.

Somebody giving you a hard time? Grab whatever is closest to you and use it as a melee weapon. There is a cure, mind you, but it takes eight hours to kick you back to normal. When an office building gets quarantined with the virus, who is going to make it out alive? Now I went into this pretty cold, but this was sold to me as absolute insanity, and right out of the gates, the film presents itself as being balls-to-the-wall nuts with violence and debauchery.

I personally don't feel that it ever reached exactly what it promised, but it did hold my attention as far as being entertaining. From the beginning, I was excited for this. It seems like it is made for people in corporate America, almost like an Office Space on weapon's grade stimulants, or a Grand Theft Auto in an office building.

It is that, but I have a complaint that I really wasn't expecting to have on this: I don't think that it goes far enough with it. Once it presents itself as this fantasy where you have to go from level boss to level boss, it ends up playing out exactly like a video game, and it doesn't really have all that many surprises.

Also, I was hoping to have more moments that made me go "OOOOOO", and that is noticeably absent, being very standard for the most part. It is something that I had just recently seen done to great success in Brawl in Cell Block 99, so maybe my gauge for this type of movie had just been thrown in an unfair direction for this movie.

I think that this is okay. I don't think this is going to appease the people who it is marketed towards, and if this isn't your bag, there would be no reason to watch this in the first place. I will say that Steven Yeun really commits in this role and gives it his all, but most of his surrounding cast is pretty bland and just playing stereotypes.

If you want to see a story about sticking it to the man, you could do worse, but you could also do better than Mayhem.