The Five Rules Of Success Review- A Brutal Walk Through The Underbelly Of Society

There is nothing more horrific than reality. I’m not talking about dating games and the housewives of whatever rich you want to add in. I’m talking about the gritty, raw, and tragic reality of our failing justice system. The Five Rules Of Success is a punishing look at the scars that broken institution leaves behind and the horrors that can never be escaped.

The appropriately named X is a product of a society that has locked him away and forgotten about him. He is newly released from prison with nothing but an enterprising mind and a desire to stay straight. X tries to make something of his life with an optimistic stranglehold on strict rules that he wields like a weapon against further criminality. But, unfortunately, everything, including his abusive parole officer, seems out to trip him up. Despite finding a job and an apartment, he finds himself on the wrong side of the law.

The Five Rules Of Success isn’t what someone would typically think of as a horror movie. There aren’t any ax-wielding maniacs, no backwoods hillbillies, and no demons possessing bodies. What there are all too real realties. X is a guy born into violence and baptized on abuse. He never really had a chance despite doing everything he could to build himself up.

Santiago Segura(X) is an emotive, explosive presence on the screen. As with most low-budget films, the movie lives and dies by the actors. In this case, Segura centers the movie grounding the story through shocking jolts of sound and lights designed to unsettle the viewer and force them to confront the constant violent imagery X and others like him live with.

Director Orson Oblowitz is clearly making a statement that prisoners released after time served are on borrowed time. Unfortunately, in The Five Rules Of Success, they’re in a purgatory of sorts. Religious imagery in the form of angel wings in the strip joint X and his employer’s son Danny(Jonathan Howard) hang out drive the concept as well as animal skulls that propel the message that things will not end well.

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There is a raw grittiness to X’s scenes with Danny that paint a picture of electric excitement in the midst of bone-crushing futility. Danny is trouble. He doesn’t want to be, but he is. Howard and Segura share a chemistry that drives the movie. They are unfairly two sides of the same coin. One has caring parents and advantages that he squanders away, choosing quick fixes that ignore the law. In contrast, X was thrust into a life of crime and uses it to crawl out of the muck. At the end of the film, all that is left is a searing sense of nihilism and inequity.

The driving soundtrack is made all the more effective by the closing haunting melody that X speaks over. His body was broken, but his spirit, the human spirit, lives on. As desperate and bleak as the ending is, X is proof that goodness can’t be sullied completely. The music in The Five Rules Of Success is like life. It is messy, loud, and disgusting. Life isn’t fair, and for those who are scraped from the bottom of society’s shoes, it is often desperate and dirty.

The sad thing about The Five Rules To Success is X never had a chance. Whether it be a system designed to fail, bad luck, or bad choices, the story never could have ended another way. The inevitable depressing slog through this young man’s life is painful to watch but necessary to bear witness too. This is a punishing movie that is an assault on the senses. It feels like a visual Skinny Puppy song played at a decibel of 10. However, just because it is a difficult watch doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. The Five Rules Of Success is streaming on iTunes and Amazon right now.