The Trotsky Review

The Trotsky is one of those movies that you see that has an interesting premise, but then you watch the movie and notice it does not go much more into exploring its own initial concept.

The Plot

It stars Jay Baruchel, who is mostly known as that guy from Tropic Thunder that looks like that other guy from Ghost-busters. He plays a teenager named Leon Bronstien, a Anglophone in Montreal who believes he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, a Russian revolutionary who worked side by side with Lenin until Stalin kicked him out and got some Spanish guy to brutally murder him with an ice pick in Mexico. That’s gonna hurt. After starting a strike at his dad’s workplace, he forces him to go to, uh oh! PUBLIC SCHOOL. And he has to convince all these public kids that they should rise up against the administration and form a real student union to represent the interests of the students. He has to help free public kids from their apathy and turn to direct action. IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL.

To be fair, this is a public Anglophone school, and as a guy who went to a Catholic school, public schools are probably the scariest place on the planet. One time this girl felt bad for me when I told her I went to a Catholic school, but to be fair it’s nothing like it is in the movies. The girls just wore whatever they wanted! Only one of my teachers became a nun, and I didn’t even get to see the Pope at my graduation, which was very disappointing. I was thinking about asking him why don’t we just call a crusade against pedophiles or something. Or why he tries to be humble when he literally lives in his own cute sovereign state with its own secret library nobody can read the books from. There’s probably proof of aliens, a 367 year old Neapolitan pizza recipe, and a VHS copy of a car safety video I’ve been trying to look for many years.

From left to right: Generic slightly-chubby red haired man, Trotsky, edgy/cool/gangsta/emo/goth/dark/tomboy girl #5819518132

Underlying features

Notice how I lost focus back there? That reminds me that this movie has lost focus. They don’t really do much to explore the wacky concept. I mean it’s not even deep with any communist themes so you’re just left with not much to think about. In fact, we don’t even know if he’s serious or not at the end. He’s a little nervous every time he speaks, but the world pulls a bunch of things around him such as meeting his love interest when she is 7 years older than him, just like the real Leon Trotsky. Are they coincidences or not? The movie says who cares! Whatever, maybe this relationship might be interesting, since it’s an older woman right? Nah, it just gives up on that too, which is pretty lame since it was something not often explored about in movies. She just hates him from how annoying he is and then falls in love with him because of how annoying he is. But all of these sort of movies are like that, so what was I expecting anyway.

I mean the most edgiest thing in the movie was when he drops a truth bomb about how priests abused all those Newfoundlanders, and how stupid and useless the government and the Catholic Church were in stopping it.

Also for some reason Ben Mulruney makes a short appearance in this movie despite the fact that he’s just some guy that’s on a stupid show called eTalk, but to be fair, the movie makes fun of eTalk a few times so it balances it out. I never even watched eTalk. There was also this guy called Dwight that everyone hated, which was probably the funniest thing in this movie despite how simple it is.

The other characters are kinda flat and just feel like props into his fantasy that we still don’t know if it’s a fantasy or not. But you can tell the movie is distinctly Canadian, right down to the colour style that has to emulate the colour style that other down-to-earth British films and television has used. Not a lot of spoken French in a movie taking place in Montreal, I know it’s on “the Anglophone” side, but come on.

While it had let me down by a lot, the move is still passable at what it does. If you’re looking for another 2000s era high school comedy movie, this is the movie for you. I give this movie a 5/10

OH WAIT A MINUTE. It turns out that there is no subtitles included on the DVD at all! No subtitles on a movie literally released 10 years ago, ladies and gentlemen. I mean whoever made these DVDs were aware of the communist themes right? It’s about removing all oppression in the world, which this movie does not by making deaf and hard of hearing audiences unable to watch the movie. It has twice the irony because there isn’t even French subtitles either. Maybe it is on the Blu-Ray copy, but I got the DVD one since that was what they had at my library. The DVD is ablest, so I’m sorry guys, but this movie is instantly disqualified and gets an automatic 0/10.