the leading man is my tpye

Sadly Over-hyped

Highly Overrated But Still Good

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Undocumented is about a couple of grad students making a documentary about illegal immigrants crossing the US border. But things go wrong when the vehicle that their in gets jacked by so called "Patriots". Chris Peckover did a great job as a director. Throughout the movie i didn't really feel connected to the characters due to dumb decisions. But they also made some good ones. The acting is pretty good. It is a decent time waster but nothing to special. I would say check it out if you think it sounds cool. I wouldn't buy it on DVD unless its a good deal. It is on Netflix Instant Watch.Movie Reviewer, Dean Nixon

I did not enjoy this movie. I don't think this is a movie made to be enjoyed. What did make me happy was knowing just how uncomfortable a "patriotic" American would be to hear the same garbage he or she states come from the mouth of an all-too possible xenophobic lunatic spouting the same rhetoric and self-interest as any average American might do. It's a likely premise that makes you quite uncomfortable. I would really love to watch an anti-immigration supporter watch this film and not stir in their seat. This is because this is quite simply a brutal scenario that could (or maybe already has) occurred. The movie tries to put into perspective the plight of illegal immigrants.It's a difficult thing to do, I guess, but when you're subjected to a Mexican farmer's wife being torn apart and his little girl shredded on barbed wire for nothing more than the fact that they are "illegal parasites" who are poor and desperate, it makes you wonder how you can think such terrible things about people. What would I do to save my family if I lived in a country overrun by cartels and warlords? A country where I couldn't make enough money to feed my family no matter how hard or long I worked? What would you do? I think we all already know the answer. The answer is you'd run to the first place you could find that would be safer for you and your family. You'd work any miserable, rubbish job just to never return to that place and to watch your child grow up safe and happy. As much as it may be a "torture porn" movie (which I dislike above all other types of horror film as my other reviews will show) it still made me think in the end. I think that's what this movie is trying to do. I commend it for that.

As much as there is to criticize about "Undocumented," I have to admit it does a very audacious thing, at least for a horror picture made on the caliber and budget of cheapsploitation classics like "Baker County" and "I Spit on Your Grave": it forces you to actually turn the camera eye on yourself and your beliefs on illegal immigration, whatever they may be, and then confront the very real, but often unseen, after shocks of those beliefs.Pretty boy and girl Scott Mechlowicz and Alona Tol head up a group of five scarily naive grad students who are doing their thesis on the plight of illegals and their often fatal journeys across the border by...get this: actually aiding them in their trek. If you can get past this admittedly foolhardy and absurd premise, the rest of the film is actually *easier* to swallow, and that's what makes it so much harder to watch and, by turns, to look away from.On arriving on New Mexico soil, they are immediately ambushed by a gang of paramilitary "patriots" led by "Z" (an insanely chilling Peter Stormare who remains masked for virtually the entire film). What follows is nothing we haven't seen before in the "Hostel" films: ritual humiliation, torture, and full-on carnage, but...this time it's not for the lark of a few rich and twisted businessmen to get their rocks off. No, these sadists actually have a point to make and, for me at least, this really catapulted this snuff box of a movie into a very discomfiting and visceral space in my brain."Undocumented" isn't the first horror film to shove hatred into our line of sight and then force us to ingest it, but it does it in such a convincing stylized nightmare way to make it difficult to shake off. More than a few people I've talked to have had a rough time forgetting this film purely because much of Stormare's didactic prattling has inadvertently (or not) come from their own mouths at one time or another. It's disquieting in a way few horror films manage to achieve because, unlike high-handed circle jerks such as "Funny Games," you can see where the villain's bile originates.In addition to Stormare's tour-de-sicko turn, Mechlowicz continues his run of quietly breakout performances: from "Mean Creek" to "Gone" to this film, he seems bent on forcing you to look past his air-brushed looks by turning in very convincing portraits of deeply-troubled, morally conflicted heroes and villains. The fact that he effectively 180's you from believing his character a pompous a-hole to someone you feel genuine pity for is pretty amazing in itself.Look, this isn't Citizen Kane. It's not even Citizen Ruth...newcomer Chris Peckover doesn't have the chops of Alexander Payne or Orson Welles. Not yet, anyway. Still this isn't your big brother's crappy little torture flick from the turn of the millennium. No, this one is a bit too true to life for something you'll forget that easily. Even if you wish you could.

'Undocumented' follows a documentary crew who is attached to a group of Mexican immigrants who have paid enormous sums of money to a coyote (not the cat-snatching mongrel, rather a smuggler of people) to get into the United States. Illegally, in case you weren't getting the point. The irony is that legal entrance to the United States is cheaper and safer, if safety is part of the calculation - but that's politics, and a hard topic to rationally discuss in Texas, California, or Arizona.Incredibly the creators of 'Undocumented' use blood and abject terror to drive the discourse in a way that TV's Border Wars simply cannot. And no matter what side you sit on the political spectrum, you will think about the subject matter.The crew, the coyote, and the huddled and downtrodden Mexican subjects are high-jacked minutes after they cross the border. Since they are all in the back of a cargo truck, they all figure they're busted. What's unusual is that the Border Patrol doesn't normally take in the illegal aliens in the same transport carrying them. And they would probably not hear the coyote getting body-slammed and some stick-time just prior. They are all offloaded and corralled. The obviously American film crew are individually interrogated, blindfolded and bound, in an effectively disturbing series of cut shots.They've been captured by an ultra-radical anti-(illegal)-immigration group: a more ruthless, sickeningly twisted, and better organized version of Arizona's Minutemen. There's really no dancing around that comparison. And they've got a message for the film crew they want to share.The group's leader, "Z" says it best (though I gotta paraphrase it - I really didn't expect the movie to be quotable): "Whatever you think is going on here, this is worse." Straight talk, delivered in skull-cracking, blood-splashing, bone-splitting reality.The synopsis on Time Warner described it as a "blood-soaked psychological thriller." And it is. I'll forgo much more plot description because it really needs to be seen to be understood. It's a fairly straightforward narrative, packed with tension and allegory. To tell you, dear reader much more is to spoil the uncomfortable fun.The cast does exceptional and memorable work: Liz, the high-minded liberal producer (Alona Tal, of lots o' TV and voice-overs since 2003); her erstwhile boyfriend and the project's journo-opportunistic director, Travis (Scott Mechlowicz, of 'Eurotrip'); the Mexican émigré cousin, Alberto (the more-than-credible Yancey Arias) of one of the crew, Davie (Greg Serano, with a solid TV CV); and drug-using sound guy smart ass, Jim (Alias' Kevin Weisman).Even the narratively expendable characters turn negligible "raw meat" roles into loss. The tragic chorus of ill-fated illegal aliens are authentic and utterly haunting, as if director Chris Peckover actually captured and tortured them. (He didn't. Right?)The film treads the kind of suggested territory that franchise torture porn such as Hostel and Saw is awkwardly compelled to throw at the audience in explicit, anatomically-correct splatter. The argument that such franchises are simply satire is lost: 'Undocumented' is pure and sophisticated satire that teases the sensibilities of the viewer without abusing them into disaffection. You care. And stranger still, your perspective - your "side" - is apt to vacillate. It's a "hard" movie.I could go on and on: I can't stop thinking about this film. I was on the edge of my seat early on, and gripped until the very end. It's a brilliant effort that touches nerves you may not even know you have. The closing shot and speech, the first reveal of the masked radicals, the enigmatic "Z" and the breadth of the cabal is unforgettable - cinema gold.Oh, yeah, "Z" - played by an actor to whom most of the $1.4mm budget probably went, and well worth it - was the subject of a little game. We resisted looking him up until the end of the film. Neither I nor she won, but we both slapped our foreheads with a big old DUH.