Bellavance (Ray Wise) is a gangster out on bail on a murder charge, so he needs money and fast to flee the country. As luck would have it, he knows where to get the cash he needs because a bunch of people stole a large amount of his ill-gotten gains and thought they'd get away with it, not counting on his cunning. So he has to send a message: make it loud, clear and messy. Nobody steals from Bellavance and gets away with it, and his minions led by Lloyd (Dana Ashbrook) set out to murder everyone who has crossed their boss...
Yeah, it sounds like yet another gangster flick, doesn't it? But stick with The Aggression Scale, because under that clichéd beginning and not very impressive title was a neat little thriller which did for survivalist movies what First Blood had done for them back in the eighties, only with the twist that our resourcefully violent hero was a kid, Owen (Ryan Hartwig). He shows up soon after that introduction where we see a couple of people getting blown away for displeasing Bellavance, although Twin Peaks fans might have been equally displeased to see the erstwhile Leland Palmer and Bobby Briggs only had one scene together.
No matter, Wise was simply here for guest star status and didn't appear as though he'd spent more than one day on the film anyway. Owen, it turns out, is living with his dad Bill (Boyd Kestner) who has just got married to Maggie (Lisa Rotondi), a single mother with a teenage daughter Lauren (Fabianne Therese) who really doesn't want this situation, new home in the country and all. Director Steven C. Miller spent quite a bit of time setting up this dysfunctional but trying their best family, with Lauren revealed to have attempted suicide, and Owen the never-speaking recipient of child psychology thanks to his brutal revenge on the bullies at school (this is what the title alludes to).
Once we had the measure of that lot, enter Lloyd and his three buddies, who waste no time in getting to the crux of the matter: they want the money and they know Bill has it, so can he hand it over please? To show they mean business, they splatter Maggie's brains all over the floor, and the red stuff begins to flow with a vengeance, only not all of it from the family as a fair amount comes from the increasingly hapless henchmen, finding the little boy more of a handful than they anticipated. Owen and Lauren go on the run, but aware the bad guys are in hot pursuit, the newly revealed as a master survivalist kid devises a selection of booby traps to take them down, all the more humiliatingly in that they've been outsmarted by a twelve-year-old.
Which may make you think of a similar home invasion thwarted by small person movie, Home Alone, but it was more Rambo which was the main influence, albeit a pint-sized version, and possibly less sadistic than Macaulay Culkin had been. Not that it was any less grim when characters got injured, except in this one they went on to be killed into the bargain, with Owen proving quite the innovator thanks to all those books he's been learning techniques from. As far as that went, this was pretty good, and for all its implausibilities you wouldn't be too bothered if you'd been brought up on action movies where one man takes down a horde of villains singlehanded (though Owen has assistance from his stepsister, when she's not screaming and crying). There was a move to make this at least a shade more realistic by banking on the criminals underestimating their situation, and if even such factors as the method in which Owen dodges a bullet relied on a lot of luck, Miller worked up satisfaction on a small budget. Music by Kevin Riepl.
[Anchor Bay has released this on UK DVD with no extras, though it is worth supporting.]
