“The Brink,” the new HBO sitcom from Roberto Benabib (“Doctor Doctor,” “Herman’s Head,” “Weeds”) and his novelist brother Kim Benabib (“Obscene Bodies”) appears to be trying to update the hilarious Kubrick doomsday movie “Dr. Strangelove,” but it is much, much less funny.
It deals with a nutty Pakistani general plotting nuclear attacks against Israel and India.
Jack Black, star and mastermind behind HBO’s old “Tenacious D” show before his movie career took off, stars as a low-level U.S. state department bureaucrat alongside Tim Robbins as the super-horny U.S. secretary of state.
… the geocomedy equivalent of a shruggie symbol with dick and barf jokes. You can build a political-comedy engine fueled on nothing more than cynicism–Veep pulls it off every season–but you need prime material, not broad, caricatured, warmed-over Dr. Strangelove with more full-frontal. Maybe the show’s mad-mad-world-war style is meant to be a throwback, down to the title-credits art, which features a finger on a Cold War-vintage button. But The Brink is far more likely to trigger a hasty finger on your TV remote. …
... nobody is going to get in trouble because of this show. But people aren’t going to die laughing, either. …
... unfortunately flaccid …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... Much of it works very well because of the casting and, to some extent, character direction. The pacing is a bit flaccid here and there, but most of the jokes are worth waiting an extra beat for. …
... If you hate farce, and if your tolerance for hit-or-miss humor, some of which involves poop and penises, is low, then “The Brink” will probably strike you as woefully immature. … I found the “Dr. Strangelove”-like series, which was created by brothers Roberto and Kim Benabib, consistently entertaining, if not hysterical, and plotted with care, so that three distinct story lines dovetail nicely. …
... The show may err toward silliness, but the cast is uniformly good …
... with a jokey, anything-for-a-gag tone and a fondness for rat-a-tat banter and insults that plays like “Veep’s” addled cousin, offering its own look at petty squabbling within the White House and government. In terms of frittering around the edges of being worthwhile but not getting there, “The Brink” is aptly titled. …
... The Brink aims to poke fun at world diplomacy by insisting that almost everyone at the highest levels of power is a fool focused on his or her basest desires. In the right hands, it could be as provocative as the Kubrick film it emulates. But as it stands, it barely would pass muster as a back-half sketch on SNL. …
10:30 p.m. Sunday. HBO.
