Watch This Trailer: "Bad Ass"

I’m consistently impressed by how pissed off the Internet gets over meaningless things. Especially when race is even a minor factor.

This might also impress the makers of Bad Ass, the new film starring Danny Trejo and directed by Craig Moss, a guy who’s credits include a slew of forgettable spoofs. It’s an adaptation of the now legendary (and racially charged) story of Epic Beard Man, the homeless vet who became famous on Youtube for a bus fight in Oakland. Here’s the trailer and the rundown from the film’s Facebook page.

A Decorated Vietnam hero Frank Vega returns home only to get shunned by society leaving him without a job or his high school sweetheart. It’s not until forty years later when an incident on a commuter bus (where he protects an elderly black man from a pair of skin heads) makes him a local hero where he’s suddenly celebrated once again. But his good fortune suddenly turns for the worse when his best friend Klondike is murdered and the police aren’t doing anything about it.

But this fun little action movie has made white power types and people who say shit like, “I’m not a racist, but…” followed by something extremely racist, pissed off.

If you’re at all familiar with the Internet you know that any YouTube or IMDB comments section, especially when the video or movie in question deals with or features non-white people in any way, can sometimes read like a transcript from a Klu Klux Klan rally. All thats missing is an ASCII burning cross. Consider the Bad Ass IMDB page:

And from YouTube:

To break it down: Filmmakers have taken the story of a white Vietnam vet/senior citizen, who beats up a black guy on a bus in Oakland and transformed it into a Mexican-American Vietnam vet/senior citizen, who beats up two white skinheads on a bus, while defending an elderly black man in Los Angeles, and white people around the world are pissed. Got it?

If people aren’t angry about the racial stuff, then they are at the very least steamed up that Epic Beard Man reportedly (according to rumors on message boards, which are always reliable) wasn’t compensated for his life story and that the entire story has been changed. OK, now read that sentence back and think about it for longer than three seconds.

As I see it, you can blame the Internet for this delightfully confusing horse muck. It used to be that we moviegoers could go sit down, watch a movie like Hurricane, and walk away thinking that all of the misery that befell Reuben Carter was because of one racist white cop and not the systemic racism of say, the American justice system. Nowadays people are way more keyed in to the whole story. They know the ins and outs, the events in question, the subsequent analysis from all sides and the perspectives of the key parties through extensive interviews. It’s like everyone in the world has become a jury that actually pays attention to everything that’s happening and everyone has something to say about it (#Kony2012, anyone?).

I don’t mean to be an apologist for the entertainment industry machine, but flipping current events into cheap Hollywood fodder is nothing new. Bad Ass is just another example of this time-honored tradition that has yielded countless films, novels, and essentially the entire plot-line of every Law and Order franchise ever.

But twist too many facts and you’ll bring in the virulent commenters. Ultimately, the rage over Bad Ass‘s exploitation of a homeless man’s story (possibly without compensating him) is a reminder to the mainstream media that toying with race and Internet memes will bring on a fight that no one really wants to see.

Follow O'Coin on Twitter @OCOIN