A quiet community reveals an ugly underside in the wake of a horrible crime in this independent drama. Robbie Levinson (Seth Peterson) and Trey McCoy (Brian J. Smith) are a gay couple who've been together for six years; they've been sharing a comfortable home in suburban Dallas most of that time, and are planning to get married once the legalities work themselves. Robbie and Trey are good neighbors who get along well with the other folks in the community until Chris Boyd (Chad Donella) moves in
next door. Chris is a youth pastor at a church run by his father (Bruce Davison), a fundamentalist Christian who preaches often and with great vehemence about the evils of homosexuality. Chris doesn't keep his feelings about gays to himself, and when Trey is found dead in a nearby park, the victim of a sadistic beating with a baseball bat, Robbie believes Chris may be involved. However, Chris' father and mother provide an alibi for him, and the police hand the case from Detective Fisher (Farah White), who investigates hate crimes, to Sgt. Esposito (Giancarlo Esposito) in the homicide department. Robbie is appalled to discover he's now the leading suspect in the murder, and begins making his own investigation into Trey's death. Hate Crime was the first feature film from writer and director Tommy Stovall. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
First-time director Stovall renders all with the kitchen-lit, squarely composed aesthetic of timid prime-time TV, and his moral schema is no less ordinary.
The portrait of the Boyds is painted by Tommy Stovall, the film's writer and director, with such broad and venomous strokes that if the gay characters had been portrayed in the same way, the film would rightly be seen as bigoted.
On the surface, Hate Crime may seem like a movie about violence rooted in religious bigotry, but underneath it's a poorly disguised argument for vigilantism.
One day, a truly original screenplay will be written in which churchgoing, beer-drinking Southerners will be portrayed as something other than evil hypocrites.
It takes a turn toward vigilante justice, Texas-style, where everybody has a gun. They trade a hate crime for a crime of hate, and that mixed message overshadows the potential of this film.
While Stovall's study of hate crimes is well acted, and with the right intentions, it can never get off the ground and feel like a unique dissection, and still comes off as an episode of a cop show in the end.
The movie tries to make a point and send out a message. While the intentions might have been good, what I got to see in the form of a thriller wasn't quite so. Its predictability and preachy parts didn't bother me as much as its story so filled with loopholes. And if the director has the same excuse that the Sergeant
makes towards the end, I'd have a hard time pardoning him. Many of the significant twists and turns simply don't add up to. I'd have readily ignored one or two, but here we've got enough at hand to make the movie lame. Tolerable, but not recommended from my end.
"Hate Crime" is a senseless and vicious murder of a gay man just because he's gay. The ending may satisfy some feeling of justice, but is hardly better than the original crime. There is an interesting section with back and forth scenes of "God is" stuff. The movie is well done.
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