This movie was….funny. It wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t one of the best comedies I had ever seen, and it wasn’t particularly memorable. However, I was entertained for almost 90 minutes. For once that's all I wanted.
Maybe it’s because my standards for new cinema has fallen over the last six months. Maybe it’s just because everyone in the packed theater was really into the film and I got that nice psychological boost from the group laughter. Whatever the reason, I’m willing to say that, so far, this was the best comedy of the summer. This is high, low praise for a film that made me laugh often enough but whose lines I can’t recall at all less than 24 hours later.
This isn’t going to be the next Super Troopers or even the next Zombieland, but I think most audiences are going to walk out of this movie with a smile on their faces. Thanks to the resurgence of ‘adult comedy’ that The Hangover started, we have yet another R-Rated comedy that at least strives to be something slightly different. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as our pizza delivery boy slacker Nick, and his best friend Chet (Aziz Ansari, a comedian who I will admit cracks me up 95% of the time) we get a little taste of what it would be like to be kind of an idiot trapped in a plot concocted by really big idiots.
Those two ‘big idiots’ are Dwayne and Travis, ably played by two guys who are pretty much hired solely to play idiots, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson. I like them both, but Danny McBride is definitely funnier in smaller doses, like the way he is used here, rather than as the star of a movie such as the little-loved Your Highness. If you have seen a single trailer, you of course know that Dwayne and Travis strap a bomb to Nick’s chest and force him to rob a bank in a matter of hours or face blowing the hell up.
What the trailer doesn’t tell you is that for a film that is hyped as a bank-robbery-comedy, the entire plot is far more convoluted and better than advertised. Nick is actually forced to rob a bank so that Dwayne can get the money he needs to turn around and pay off someone else to do something that could result in his receiving over twenty times the amount of money Nick could possibly deliver. The convoluted plot doesn’t always work, but it at least offers a few funny moments from the four primary stars and several bit players throughout the movie.
Unfortunately there isn’t really much else to say about it. I don’t want to go into the plot in any more detail for fear of ruining some of the refreshing surprises, and the acting was perfectly passable. There’s still too much emphasis on McBride’s part in his attempt to equate swearing with humor, and Eisenberg’s character, while endearingly goofy, is still largely unchanged from when I saw in him Roger Dodger a decade ago.
So go see this film if you want to laugh and aren’t concerned about finding this year’s super-quotable ‘everybody’s gonna be buzzing about this flick’ movie. It’s far better than Your Highness and Bad Teacher, even slightly better (in my estimation) than Horrible Bosses, but it’s no future classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment