“I’m not a hipster,” said the hipster. “But, he is.”

Writer/director Ashley Cahill stars as Malcolm, a middle aged British New York City jerk who pines for the good old days of the rough and tumble New York City of the 70s and 80s. He blames gentrification, which he believes is singularly caused by the “Broken Windows” clean up policy of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg for turning the crime-ridden streets of New York into a family-friendly playground. His solution: to go on a killing spree with the intent on single-handedly raising the crime rates of the city and reigniting white flight.

What follows is an 86-minute dry hump of Man Bites Dog, as a documentary crew follows Malcolm around while he tries to kill enough people to get in the paper. As the papers ignore all of the murders he commits, Malcolm increasingly becomes frustrated and starts bending his own principles, if they were there at all. Pseudo-plot developments are interspersed with life theory monologues and rapid fire montages of Malcolm brutally killing a variety of people.

Cahill has bitten off far more than he can chew. Malcolm is supposed to be an annoying egotistical twit who refuses to acknowledge his own privilege and participation in the very things he’s railing against. The structure of Man Bites Dog to contrast the allure of a charismatic man with the reality that he’s actually a privileged murderous jerk. But, Random Acts of Violence contrasts the annoyance of Malcolm as a privileged jerk with the reality that he’s also a spree killer. Even if he thinks Malcolm has a point about gentrification, Cahill refuses to allow him to have the charisma for us to believe it. In turn, Cahill is also criticizing Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, based on the real life Chicago spree killers Leopold and Loeb, where two guys kill their friend in order to prove the point that they are superior to everybody else. Similar to Man Bites Dog‘s Ben, Rope‘s charismatic killers, who throw a fabulous party, use their charm to pull off their theory even if they ultimately don’t get away with it.

Malcolm has no charm. It almost seems that Cahill has designed Malcolm with the intent that Malcolm is an uncharismatic vacuum at the center of an movie about immorality. This would point to a New York, New York-style criticism of the charismatic killer movies. But, then, is Cahill also criticizing Malcolm for being against gentrification? Is he saying that Malcolm’s theories are founded on privileged logic and an romanticization of the people beneath him? In turn, isn’t that a privileged stance to take?

At the heart of Cahill’s hipster criticism lies the realization that Cahill is just as insufferable a hipster as his character. On a political level, Cahill is as confused as his character. On an entertainment level, you have to spend 86 minutes in the presence of a poorly-acted murderous hipster who will periodically rant at the camera. There was the seed of a good movie somewhere in this mess, but it has to overcome a huge hurdle in the form of Actor/Director/Writer Ashley Cahill.