It hurts me so much when I want to love a movie so much but it just doesn’t want me to love it. This film had all the pieces to the puzzle of what I want a great comedy to be predicated on. I loved the actors: Danny McBride (Eastbound & Down), Aziz Ansari (Funny People) and Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland and Zombieland); I am in love with the directors previous debut film – Zombieland – and I just think that the idea of a pizza guy having to rob a bank because someone threatens his life with a bombvest seems kind of funny. Ok, maybe that last part was a lie, but everything else works, at least as a pitch.
The selling point of this movie, more than the ridiculous – and actually true – premise of the film, is the relationships and motivations of our two pairs of best friends. Our protagonists, Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and Chet (Aziz Ansari), and our antagonists, Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson), and just a pair of dumb best friends who in any TV show or film we’d just love to watch sit in a room together and mock themselves silly. If you don’t enjoy the time that you spend with both of these pairs then the movie is pretty much a waste of your time, and that’s what truly made the ninety minute or so long feature pretty dull for me.
Danny McBride has been an actor that I’ve been defending over the years. There’re films where his character of being an equally excessive level of arrogant and ignorant while constantly being the alpha male in the room works for me. However, this is not one of them. So while I’ve heard and seen it all before with McBride making numerous sexually charged metaphors for stuff happening around him and in films like Tropic Thunder and Observe and Report it worked for me here it failed completely.
When I think more about it I believe that the now trite nature of the comedic style of the film is the film’s biggest problem. This film doesn’t offer me anything new to chew on. It’s not the best excuse in today’s world of constant remakes and reboots everything is either recycled or purposefully referenced for some easily grabbed “geek” points with fans, but here it just feels stale in all honesty. In almost every other comedy – that isn’t produced by Adam Sandler or Vince Vaughn – that’s released today the main gag is predicated on the excercise of two main characters, usually friends, sitting beside each other mocking themselves silly. While this film followed that format, I just didn’t feel like the rythm between either pair of friends of the film was right.
I hope that revisiting this film towards the end of the year will change my views on it, but I’m not optimistic. It’s a comedy that happens to have too few truly funny moments and they’re all too far apart for to say that I ever truly enjoyed this movie. Michael Pena makes an appearance in the film, and while being the best part of the entire movie, and he completely rehashes his performance from Eastbound & Down with the added fact that he has a gun.
Rating: 4.5/10