I wanted to like Kevin Smith's latest film, Red State, ever since first reading about it in this excellent piece by Jason Bailey about the weird, self-defeating distribution scheme Smith used to essentially sink the film's chances of ever reaching a truly wide audience. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get into the movie – for a bunch of reasons.

Smith tried to direct a serious film before with the utterly forgettable Chasing Amy, but Red State is his first attempt to do a violent suspense drama. Part horror, part action flick, Smith fills his tale of religious extremism with two-dimensional characters and lots of violence, and then paints a thin, gaudy veneer of social and political commentary over the top.

And nothing really works.

The narrative is choppy, with no clear sense of which characters we're supposed to care about. The kidnapped boys at the beginning of the film appear to be main characters, but Smith kills them off one by one without bothering to give them humanity or depth.

John Goodman's character, the beaten down ATF agent, isn't even introduced until halfway through the film, and doesn't do anything that makes us care about him until right before he walks offstage.

Meanwhile the villains are horror movie spoofs of the Fred Phelps gang – the sign-wielding "God Hates F**s" religious extremists that show up at military funerals – only Smith's fundamentalists are also gun nuts who kidnap and then murder people they think are sinners. In other words, they're the embodiment of just about every right-wing stereotype you can imagine wrapped up into one gruesome caricature.

Smith had an opportunity to do something interesting with the showdown between the ATF and the fundamentalists. The cartoonish ATF boss orders Goodman's character, Joseph Keenan, to wipe out the entire compound, including the children, when things go wrong.

So we're poised to have what might have been an interesting discussion about terrorism, religious extremism, and the role of government in the post-9/11 era and Smith even tries to have that discussion. After all, however awful the murderous religious sect is, it's just as awful – and possibly more so – for the government to kill them all without a trial, including the children.

But the lack of any interesting characters, the choice to turn the second half of the film into one long, boring gun fight, and the decision to "surprise" audiences by killing characters off right and left before we can find it in ourselves to care about them leaves the film flat.

Whatever social commentary might have bubbled to the surface was mired in the garish portrayals of the religious sect and the government agents. Meanwhile, the lack of any actual people -as opposed to the talking props Smith wrote into his film – that might have anchored the narrative to something human and emotional, instead turned the story into a violent melodrama about nothing.

No coherent narrative, no emotional connection, Red State is a crude morality tale that falls short on pretty much every level. Maybe it's a good thing it didn't go to theatres after all.

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