Written by Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo
Directed by E.L. Katz
Starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry and David Koechner
USA
Here’s another one I wrote off as an edge-fest. The guys from RedLetterMedia reviewed this a while back and it seemed like the kind of premise you’d come up with as a teenager who wants to shock someone, but then move on from once you realize you’re not the first person to think of crazy stuff. Turns out it’s pretty good – I guess I should stop writing things off, huh?
It’s about this dude who is down and out – he has a wife and kid to support, he’s having trouble making rent and he just got laid off. So he goes to a bar to have a drink, meets an old buddy who he shares his woes with, and then the two of them end up embroiled in a strange game with a couple sitting in a nearby booth – a brash rich guy and his sullen trophy wife.
What kinda game you ask? Well, it starts off innocuously enough, with the rich guy offering money for our two heroes to perform stunts – like, go over there and say something to get that woman to slap you. But things escalate quickly to the point where things like breaking and entering and self harm are involved.
There two things that keep this movie from just being a complete “look how edgy we are” compilation. The first is the performances. All four leads are great – I’m not too familiar with Pat Healy or Sara Paxton, but Ethan Embry was almost unrecognizable in his role and people should hire him for more stuff, and this was probably the best David Koechner performance I’ve ever seen – he’s good at what he does, the blowhard guy, but this character has enough other shades to show Koechner’s real range, and in a less capable actor it might not come off.
The second thing is the fact that the movie allows the characters to be conflicted about what’s going on. It allows them to really be hurt, to change their minds, to get freaked out. This movie would fail if the underlying joke was “look, these people are so checked out they’re not fazed by anything, isn’t humanity terrible.” Not at all – for the most part, this movie is happy to indulge in all the implications of what these people are doing, for better or worse, right up until the last shot, which is both darkly comic and devastating.
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