Hola all. Massawyrm here.
Epic. Fail. Is it possible for me to hate a movie worse than this? Sure. Do I want to even think about the movies that I do? Not even for a second. This. Movie. Stinks. It is a tepid, lame, middling turd bomb that just festers and falls apart on the screen before your eyes. It is not clever. It is not original. In fact, it is everything it looks like from the trailer. It is just another Odd Couple knockoff in which we slap an uptight, successful blue state city slicker into a situation with a dumbfuck red state hick. Hoo boy! Can’t wait to see how this one turns out! I wonder if they’ll come to some sort of understanding and ultimately become friends?
But what is really incredibly frustrating is that despite how bad this looks from its initial trailer, it radiates this odd sense of hope. At least I was hopeful. After all, who would have thought a movie about catty teenage girls starring (then trouble free) Lindsey Lohan would have been watchable or even good? But Fey (who wrote and costarred in it) pulled it off in a big way with Mean Girls. And when NBC was rolling out two different shows in the same season about the behind the scenes goings-ons at Saturday Night Live - one an hour long Dramedy by genius Aaron Sorkin and one a half hour sitcom - who would have bet that it would be Fey’s 30 Rock that would not only outlive the other, but continually get better?
So when you roll up to me with an awkward trailer that looks like someone pitched The Odd Couple meets Baby Boom, the only thing keeping me from listening to my quivering asshole urging me to stay as far fucking away from this as humanly possible was my hope that Fey could pull it off once more. Throw in the fact that she could again riff with Amy Poehler (who together brilliantly manned the Weekend Update desk before Fey’s departure from SNL) - then crank it up a notch by adding in Greg Kinnear, Dax Shepherd and Steve Martin - and this screams surprise hit.
I should have listened to my quivering asshole.
Tina Fey didn’t write this. She sure as fuck didn’t direct it. And I hope to God on high that she isn’t proud of it. It is not anywhere near the standards we have come to expect from her and sadly everything it appears to be. Pedestrian, mindless drek with nary a laugh in sight. What few laughs there were for the audience (I never laughed, not once) were verbatim from the trailer. And what few moments of genuine charisma actually manage their way out of the mire of this stool sample quickly find themselves sucked back in by the powerful vacuum that is all the jokes that fail.
The music is abysmal, a painful cacophony of tones that daintily tell you what a delightful comedy you’re supposed to be watching. It was one slide whistle and a bonk sound away from being ripped right out of Hannah-Barbara. Speaking of cartoons, Poehler is given an embarrassingly bad character to play. Her character Angie isn’t redneck stupid. She’s Homer Simpson stupid. Steve Martin is given a character that is kind of cute for half a scene. Oh look, they’re making fun of the Richard Branson types. Sadly the scene continues and is followed by his appearance in another twelve. And while there are a few lines that sound like they would be great on paper, the ham fisted, amateur direction ensured that not a single one of those really worked. And who the fuck in their right minds puts Will Forte and Fred Amisen in a film, gives them each 30 seconds of screen time and has them play the straight men in a scene? Here you have two guys who deliver great, small dose insanity and you bring them in for walk-ons? And don’t let them be funny? It is just another illustration of how much talent this film had only to squander it to create a senseless, lowest common denominator skid mark.
I don’t walk out of movies. It’s against my religion. Some people whip themselves for forgiveness. Some people blow themselves up for virgins. I watch every last minute of movies like Baby Mama. But this movie tested my faith. Oh it tested me. I wanted to walk out so bad that I had to fight the urge by beating my head against the railing I was sitting next to. At one point I had to relieve myself and when I stood up one of my friends audibly gasped. He thought I had finally broken. Fuck that. I sat through Meet the Spartans and Over Her Dead Body. Both in that same fucking theatre. I wasn’t going to let this rancid plopping ass lemming best me. And while this film is certainly better than those two miserable wastes of my life, it isn’t by very much.
But who knows, you could always make a game out of it or something. I mean you could get a bunch of friends together, rent this with the cinematic masterpiece My Baby’s Daddy, throw 50 bucks a piece into a hat and put a rusty screwdriver in everyone’s lap. The last one with both their eyesight and eardrums intact takes home the pot. Not that I’m suggesting it, just saying you could do it.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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