2014, d. Tristram Shapeero - AmazonPrime
Robin Williams. Joel McHale. Lauren Graham. Candice Bergen. Oliver Platt. Clark Duke. Wendy McLendon-Covey. Tim Heidecker. All of them, good to great comedic actors...some are legends. Yet, somehow, these performances feel like community theatre.
There are jokes intended here, and comedic set pieces, and yet every single one of them falls kind of flat. Director Shapeero has directed over a hundred hours of amazing television comedy before (and after) making this film. Community, Parks and Rec, Peep Show, I'm Alan Partridge, Brass Eye... the man knows funny. So why did he try to make, instead of a flat out comedy, something more akin to a scripted mumblecore family drama?
I can't say it's a great script (from Wreck It Ralph creator Phil Johnson, as "Michael Brown"), but it's clear all the beats here were meant to be comedic, with just a few little scattered notes of resonance, all leading to the climactic scene where a father and his two adult sons start discussing the best way of getting rid of a hobo Santa they accidentally ran over...a scene that's supposed to be an absurd comedic high but played so down level as if real lives were about to be ruined. Or a scene where preteen cousins encourage the youngest of them to binge eat a jar of preserved pickles. Should be funny, but it's not, you just feel sorry for the kid. It's just a misfire at every turn.
The predecessor to the climax is an almost completely unearned moment of sentimentality and self-awareness from Robin William's hardass alcoholic racist homophobic dad character. In the typical Hollywood comedy, we're expecting the turn as the guy who hilariously says all the wrong things then finally gets a clue. But here, the tone makes it feel abrupt and out of character, both for Williams to make the pivot, and for McHale to accept it.
If there's something good here, it's the score from Ludwig Goransson, who had plenty of practice at Christmas compositions with the Community holiday episodes. As well, the closing credits song, "More Than I Wished For" by FM Radio just got added to the holiday mix. It's great.
From the abysmal critics and viewer scores and ratings this film has I was expecting it to be offensively bad, a thoroughly unpleasant experience, one pushing its comedic extremes to bad taste levels such that I would have to force myself to stomach my way through... but it wasn't that. It went the other way and almost didn't strive for comedy at all, despite everything and everyone being all set up for it, and so it was curiously puzzling, and maybe a little boring as a result. It's just an unfortunate movie.
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