Someone, somewhere recommended this film to me after I mentioned the fact that I really enjoyed the film Buried with Ryan Reynolds and found it to be one of the most terrifying films I have ever seen even though the whole film takes place inside of a single room.
I think that Cargo was going for the same effect but it fails on every single level including and especially the acting.
The story is almost identical to Buried and borrows elements from Saw as well. The only character we ever see is "Mr. Peterson" but his real-life name is Ron Thompson and man does this guy need to go to acting school. He plays the role of a corrupt businessman with a dirty past who wakes up in a storage container with just a mobile phone.
He doesn't know how he got there but he soon gets a phone call demanding a ransom to be paid for his own life and the life of his wife who his tormentors have also kidnapped.
His phone is monitored and he is informed that if he tries to pull any "funny business" such as calling the police that his wife and him will be executed. He contacts business partners to try to get the money together only to discover that they don't actually want to help him because of how much of a scoundrel he has been to all of them and I guess this is supposed to be a lesson about how we shouldn't screw over people in our lives.
When he can't come up with the money he is offered the opportunity to remove parts of his body in exchange for certain amounts of money but he is provided only a plyers in order to make this happen. This is where the Saw type aspect of the film kicks in because he gruesomely removes some of his teeth.
It's completely impractical that someone would be able to do this and even more impractical that after doing so that his mouth somehow magically stops bleeding, which of course would not be the case if this was actually performed. Also, the teeth that he removed magically reappear later in the film.
I understand that they were likely working with a very small budget on this film but they could have at least splurged a bit to get someone that actually knows how to do a teensy bit of acting. Ron Thompson is far from a household name. I've never heard of him but seriously, this guy redefines bad acting and I really feel as though a lot of the dialogue was actually screwed up while filming but the director, perhaps realizing that they were making a real turd of a film, just went with the takes they already had rather than wasting more money.
Should I watch it?
If you do watch it, do so only to confirm what I have said about Ron Thompson having a complete and total lack of anything that even resembles rudimentary acting skills. Skip through it just to have a laugh at how terrible the script is, and then quickly switch it off. That's two terrible movies in a row for me so at least I have one good thing going for me: The bar has been set so low in the past 24 hours that no matter what I watch next it will likely be a masterpiece in comparison.
