If you are allergic to silliness, please be warned as you will need to stay away from this movie or else you might die of an agonising death. However, if you can stand an unbalanced story, weird characters, awful acting and over the top fantasy gun shot action, then you should give this strange cinematic work a chance.

GOODMAN TOWN has quite an interesting premise: an anti-hero versus a crazy bunch of professional killers in a MAD MAX like world with plenty of action and great cinematic ideas. Unfortunately, the story is not there to support everything and the visuals start to become abused with quick editing. It is a shame as there are really a lot of interesting ideas and great material in the movie.

The movie starts rather simple by introducing our main character Climax (Climax, Mad Max…get it?) desperately trying to escape some angry refugees, which he tried to rob just the moment before. Then, a very imaginative stop motion credit introduction starts. At this moment, I was really impressed by the director’s vision. I really had hoped that this movie was going to be an incredible piece of fun and art. Unfortunately, the more the story develops the more my hopes had fallen into small pieces. First of all, the story gets way too complicated for the kind of brainless action movie GOODMAN TOWN is. They really tried too hard on the script. In fact, it was not the three or four subplots that convoluted the main story; it was that all of them were unimaginative and confusing.

On the other side, the cinematic visuals were quite impressive to watch. There are really a lot of genius and fresh ideas, but there is also a lot of cheap fast forward and quick edit shots too. The editing can get dizzying. Generally speaking, though, the director did a good job on the cinematography and action sequences and I hope to see more of his work one day.

Character wise, it’s a mixed feeling. The acting is very poor and most of the actors seem like they are over acting their dialogue, but on the other side, their designs are incredible. When you take a look at the cover, this is the first thing that will strike you. They all look really bad ass, but on screen well that is a different thing. The main character is not a kind-hearted hero so it is normal to not really sympathize with him, but his acting is mostly limited to facial expression. The bad guys are the most interesting; they all have their own speciality moves and favourite weapons from shotguns to simple six shooters. In fact, except the stereotyped gay one, who is sometimes annoying because of the tone of his voice, they all pretty much steal the show over the main actor.

Fortunately, the action keeps the film on an appealing level. As stated earlier, the action scenes are more fantastical than realistic; unlimited ammo, bad guys who cannot shoot properly at close range, anything that is shot at explodes automatically and the good guys are either extremely lucky or just plain invincible. If you can’t stand this kind of element, you will for sure hate the movie very much.

Besides the action scenes and a few other cinematic ideas, the film has very little to offer. It is well recommended for any brainless action fan, but I personally enjoyed BROTHERHOOD 7, the other Thai action flick, a lot more. Both share a lot of very similar ideas such as over the top action and crazy character designs, but BROTHERHOOD 7 is better structured on the story side.