Monday, January 24, 2011

Worst of the Worst: #36, The Whole Ten Yards

I have not seen The Whole Nine Yards, so it's possible that I missed a lot of the point, but the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes who gave this a 4% don't seem to think so. I refused to even look up the plot of the first one. I figured I could just catch the general gist from whatever happens in this one. I sort of got what each character's role was, but it's not like I cared.

The movie is like a Fozzy Bear routine, gag after gag after gag that fall flat. There were a couple of times that I expected one of the characters to say, "Wacka wacka," or for there to be a rim shot. I'm not sure that Matthew Perry is generally funny and Amanda Peet can be hot or cold, but Bruce Willis is an accomplished actor. Pretty sure I saw him in the background of a scene cashing his paycheck. At least that was better than Kevin Pollak, playing a slapstick Hungarian gangster with bad writing and a worse accent.

In fact, if the title weren't already taken, Back For More Cash would be a fitting moniker for this lazy exercise in sequel-making. I presume the first one was generally well-liked so, like many comedy sequels -- he says, fearing for The Hangover 2 -- they just went back to the well. How lazy is it? IMDB marks seventy-two -- seventy-two -- different errors in the film. It's less a movie to be enjoyed than a continuity-error-finding game from a seriously sadistic Highlights issue.

70 down, 30 to go.

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