He Never Died movie review & film summary (2015)

I say that "He Never Died" is a horror/superhero sub-genre because Jack is the kind of meathead martyr who could either become a Hulk-style monster, or hero depending on his mood. Jack may be slightly more self-aware than most characters cast in this particular mold, but he's still essentially the kind of archetypal anti-hero that David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" follows/comments on.

Jack has a dark past. He avoids dealing with it by playing Bingo by himself and eating bland food, like oatmeal and tea, at his favorite diner. This attracts the curiosity of savvy yet powerless women like Andrea and Cara (Kate Greenhouse), the waitress at Jack's favorite diner. But Jack is a recluse beyond his regularly-scheduled appointments with what appears to be a young drug dealer. He sleeps. He gets headaches. He eats. And he stems the volcano of rage that motivates him by not giving a care about anything else.

Were it not for Rollins, Jack would be a fairly basic part. The character is written—by neophyte writer/director Jason Krawczyk—in a smirky self-reflexive way that freely acknowledges its derivative nature without actually doing anything about it. Even if you ignored how wacky-quirky it is that man-shaped mountain Jack plays bingo because "it's something to do," you'd still have to deal with the character's inconsistency.

For the most part, Jack talks like he doesn't know or care about anything beyond his immediate sphere of influence. He's comically literal-minded, as in scenes where a thug threatens him by asking him to come have a chat with him, and Jack simply replies "I'm fine here." When Cara tells Jack that he's intimidating, a flat OK suffices for him. But Jack sometimes reveals he's in on the film's joke, like when Cara asks him what the Civil War was like, and Rollins replies with a priceless glare.

Jack is an ideal role for Rollins, a bulldozer of a public figure who is sadly now more famous for being an insistent, and sometimes insensitive political gadfly than he is for being a great punk rocker. In his LA Weekly column, Rollins wrote that it's "impossible to feel bad for [Robin Williams]" because Williams killed himself. Soon after that, Rollins apologized in his own inimitable Jesus-complex way. He wrote: "I cannot defend the views I expressed. I think that would be taking an easy out. I put them out there plainly and must suffer the slings and arrows — fair enough." Rollins is open to the idea that he's wrong, but he's most convincing when he offers to take flack from people who were understandably upset by his, well, upsetting comments.

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