“Assassination Nation” is a stylish but messy satire which throws lots of things on the screen but fails to be something coherent enough to engage or excite me. Sure, right from the start, I was ready to accept the warped reality inhabited by its main characters, but the movie ultimately feels quite superficial in terms of narrative and characterization while merely being pointlessly nasty and violent, and that made me more distant to the story and characters without much care or attention.

The story is unfolded in a town called Salem, which sounds so symbolic that you will get a pretty good idea on what the movie is about right from the opening scene. As a matter of fact, the movie cheerfully gives us an obnoxiously graphic notice for viewer discretion in advance, and you can actually decide whether you really want to continue your viewing (Full Disclosure: I seriously considered quitting even though I was watching the movie along with a friend of mine at last night).

Anyway, the movie mainly revolves around four local high school girls: Lily (Odessa Young), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Bex (Hari Nef), and Em (Abra). While Lily seems to be a smart girl with good grades for going to some nice college someday, she is your average disaffected adolescent kid, and we often see her and these three friends of hers aimlessly spending time together like the young heroines of Sofia Coppola movies – or confidently strutting together in their high school like the main characters of “Mean Girls” (2004).

The mundane daily life of these girls and many other people in Salem is suddenly disrupted on one day due to some naughty anonymous hacker, who can freely hack into anyone’s smartphone somehow. First, this hacker dude hacks into the conservative mayor of the town, who is consequently humiliated a lot for the following exposure of the private contents of his smartphone. Not long after that, the principal of the local high school also gets his private contents of his smartphone exposed in public, and we become more uncomfortable because, unlike that hypocritical mayor, the principal does not deserve his following predicament at all.

Everyone in the town becomes more concerned about another hacking case to happen, but Lily does not look like being worried at all. In fact, she continues her very inappropriate online interaction with a certain adult guy in her neighborhood just because, well, she cannot help but drawn to the excitement of doing something naughty behind her back, even though she is warned later that the hacker may be focusing on her as the next target.

Meanwhile, the screenplay by director/writer Sam Levinson, who has been mainly known for his acclaimed HBO TV miniseries “Euphoria”. throws lots of blatantly thought-provoking ideas via Lily’s mouth. While she makes some good points on a number of important subjects including the misogyny on the Internet, the movie sadly stumbles a lot in its clumsy attempts on character development, and she eventually ends up feeling more like its main mouthpiece instead of a real human character with genuine life and personality.

In case of a number of supporting characters around her, they are also frequently limited by thin characterization. Ironically, Lily’s three friends are simply and mainly defined by their appearance on the surface, and I was particularly dissatisfied with a subplot involved with Bex, who is incidentally a transgender girl. In my trivial opinion, the movie could delve a bit more into Bex’s awkward relationship with a boy clearly conflicted about his attraction toward her, but it is so busy with juggling one thing after another that she remains to be a token supporting character even when things get pretty violent around her and her friends.

I forget to tell you that the situation in the town becomes much more intense and violent as the hacker goes for much more targets than before. As a consequence, the town is thrown into sheer chaos and violence while many people in the town are turned into the leftover extras from “The Purge” (2013), and Lily and her friends belatedly become more aware of how serious the circumstance around them really is.

The girls eventually become as feisty as those tough female characters of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, but the movie unfortunately does not provide much dramatic ground for making us root for them. Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, and Abra surely look great as wearing the same red attire and then shooting a lot, but, alas, their good efforts sadly do not amount to much mainly because of their cardboard roles. In addition, the movie also criminally wastes the talent of several notable cast members including Anika Noni Rose, Bill Skarsgård, Joel McHale, Kathryn Erbe, Kelvin Harris Jr., and Colman Domingo, who at least leaves some nice impression even though the movie quickly throws his supporting character away early in the story.

Overall, “Assassination Nation”, which is incidentally Levinson’s second feature film, feels rather half-baked with all those thought-provoking ideas and themes in addition to suffering from the considerable tonal problem. Although his next film “Malcolm & Marie” (2021) was a bit better in comparison, Levinson still seems to be in the need of more progress as a filmmaker, and I can only hope that he will actually engage me enough with whatever he will direct next.