Movie 43: Review

20th July 2013

He’s back again, that James Connors from SouthWalesMassive, and this time he’s taken on Movie 43.

In 2009, Peter Farrelly finally started work on his next project – an anthology of badly written shorts starring people who didn’t want to be in them, with the title coming from the idiotic warblings of his son. Sadly, 4 years later the general public have to suffer the outcome of this horrible waste of money.

You’ll often hear of films (as well as games and albums) that are described as being stuck in ‘development hell’. The longer the development, the more money that’s spent and often the final product is at best flawed, at worst an unwatchable nightmare. Disney’s ‘John Carter’ was the most recent example of a good film that suffered for it’s decade long development, while ‘Movie 43’ was probably sitting on shelves to protect anyone from having to watch it.

So ‘Movie 43’ is essentially a series of unconnected sub-internet quality shorts strung together by a pointless narrative, which changes depending on which version of the film you see. Practically every scene has an A-grade cast, which if paused shows the sadness in their eyes as they evidently hope this garbage never sees the light of day.

I honestly wanted to buck the trend, presume that most people who saw the film were eager to jump on the bandwagon of hate, but really what is there to defend? It took 4 attempts for me to get through the whole thing, splitting it up in order to primarily not fall into a coma, and secondly to not let whatever nonsense I just sat through affect how I feel about the next sketch. After all, it can’t get any worse can it?

Each clip does its absolute best to drag out its, typically banal, concept to such a degree where you wonder how anyone found it funny in the first place. A guy with balls hanging off his neck? A Tampax commercial where a woman gets eaten by a shark? A girl who asks her boyfriend to defecate on her during sex? An iPod in the shape of a naked woman? These four ‘jokes’ are dragged out to the length of 30 minutes, with no attempt to even build on the grade school level ideas. The only segment that isn’t brain numbing is a short PSA about how photocopiers and ATMs have children in them. It’s incredibly brief and it’s not amazingly funny, but it’s passable.

With sites like FunnyOrDie already widely in use by the time this started production, as well as recent sketch shows like ‘Kroll Show’ and ‘Inside Amy Schumer’ that both easily surpass ‘Movie 43’ in quality, you have to wonder why they didn’t just give up and dump this in the desert where it belongs. The idea of having to pay close to £10 to see something as bad as this in the cinema makes me wonder how anyone could’ve left remotely happy; riots have started over less.

Sadly, despite critical repulsion it made back its meagre investment so expect ‘Movie 44’ to be rushed to release in the next 6 months. For those of us who gave it a chance, we just have to suffer one of the worst attempts at comedy in recent history. On the bright side, it’s not often you can watch something that cost millions of dollars, and legitimately say – “I could do better than that”. It’s an uplifting message of hope, in the worst possible delivery. I just feel sorry for everyone who signed on for this nonsense, knowing it will remain on their resumes for the rest of their lives.

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