Quick Cut Review - "Movie 43"

Directed by:  Peter Farrelly, James Gunn, Elizabeth Banks, Brett Ratner and many more...
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Dennis Quaid, Gerald Butler and many more...
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hour 34 minutes  
Release Date: January 25, 2013

Years in the making, a script that cost 6 million dollars, featuring over a dozen directors and quite possibly the largest cast of Hollywood A-List talent ever, the much maligned and panned Movie 43 is one of those movies where you just sit back and wonder how any of this could have possibly happened? How did this movie get made? How did they get people like Hugh Jackman, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, Richard Gere, Emma Stone and Elizabeth Banks to appear in it? How did anyone that saw any of the test footage greenlight it to be finished?

Those are all but a few of a select dozen questions you will be asking yourself if you find yourself unlucky enough to be watching Movie 43. Critics have already done their job making sure everyone knows that this is a movie to be avoided at all costs (it's 4% on rottentomatoes made sure of that) and thanks to no one showing up at the box office it also became the bomb it was always meant to be. But what is it that could make this film comprised of a series of sketches so awful that it deserves the beating it has gotten? Well, that answer may surprise you.

You see, for all the crude jokes and toilet humor strewn about Movie 43, it is impossible to tell you that at certain moments its juvenile and often times outright hateful sense of humor might make you crack a smile every now and then. It might have something to do with watching an actor like Hugh Jackman pretend like he doesn't have a pair of balls hanging from his neck or watching as Chris Pratt prepares to poop all over his new wife Anna Faris (saying shit is apparently disrespectful to the woman being pooped on) or perhaps it is the glee derived from watching Megan Fox being eaten by a shark because she went swimming after using the wrong brand of tampon.

Anyway you slice it, it is kind of funny seeing these Hollywood stars slum it a bit and just say to hell with it. Sure, the individual sketches having nothing to do with one another and all of them revolve around some sort of gross out joke that never works the way it was intended (a sketch with Chloe Grace Moretz getting her first period is just cringe worthy for everyone for everyone involved), but if you are in the right state of mind, some of the film's more interesting sketches such as one with Naomi Watts and Liev Schrieber as a pair of homeschooling parents who treat their kid like shit so he gets to full effect of public school just might tickle your funny bone.

But once again, take this somewhat positive look at the film with a huge grain of salt because it likely could have been that I saw the film on a day where I was easily influenced by it's infantile charms or the chuckles that come from watching the look on a loved one's face as a car windshield is covered with feces after running over a man who had too many burritos. This isn't a good movie, it isn't even really a movie at all. It is just a poor excuse for actors and directors to play in the mud for a little bit and get all their pent up aggression out of their system so that they could go back and make real movies. See it at your own risk.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

This is a bad movie. Avoid it at all costs.

Posted in: QC review