Believe the hype…
The H-Bomb: Movie 43 is of the fucking devil. I’m not joking. Someone, some crack addled, third generation inbred dropout with the sense of humor of a brain damaged 12-year-old sold their soul to Satan to get this monumentally unfunny, unfathomably atrocious mountain of fertilizer made. Not only to get it made, but to get it released in theaters, and to bag the likes of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Halle Berry, Uma Thurman, Gerard Butler, Chloe Grace Moretz, Dennis Quaid, Naomi Watts, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, and a whole slew of other A-listers who were either bribed, blackmailed, or otherwise malevolently coerced into appearing in this unspeakable abomination masquerading as a comedy.
If you think I’m overstating things here, then you obliviously have not subjected yourself to the cinematic water boarding session that is Movie 43, and I truly envy you that, for you have no fucking idea how lucky you really are. I heard the buzz around this “film” when it came out a few months back, and typically when I hear that a movie is as bad as this one allegedly was, I just have to see it. It’s this morbid curiosity that’s ingrained in me. It’s why I’ll watch things like Boxing Helena, or The Room, and normally, I can take a sort of cruel delight in how astoundingly shitty they are. But not with Movie 43.
FUCK. NO.
This is a movie that made me cry harder than E.T., and not out of uncontrolled laughter, but out of the sheer agony of watching these great actors demean themselves for reasons I’ll never understand in this infantile drivel. Seriously, Mr. Jackman, Mr. Quaid, Ms. Winslet, Ms. Watts? What the bloody hell are you people doing in this? Hacks like Seth MacFarlane, Johnny Knoxville, and Justin Long, I can understand why those idiots would agree to lend their “talents” to this thing, but the rest of the ensemble… I just don’t get it. At all.
As you probably already know, Movie 43 is an anthology “comedy,” with vignettes from a variety of writers and directors (including Brett Ratner and the fucking Farrelly Brothers), an anthology comedy that makes Four Rooms look like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. The sketches tend to run anywhere between five and ten minutes (they all go on too long), and are held together by an incredibly flimsy framing device of down and out screenwriter Quaid trying to pitch his ideas to studio exec Greg Kinnear (another of Movie 43’s many victims). The vignettes contained in this framing device feature some of Hollywood’s biggest stars making absolute asses of themselves… and not in a good way.
I’m not going to go into every single sketch, as there are way too many, and, as an automatic defense mechanism, my brain has already blocked out large portions of this train wreck, I’ll just touch down on the “highlights.” Our first skit gives us Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman going out on a blind date. Winslet thinks she’s struck gold with this guy, until he takes off his scarf and she sees, much to her horror, that he has balls on his neck. Literally, he has testicles growing out of his throat. At first, that got a laugh out of me, then as it went on, I realized that was the skit’s one and only joke… Hugh Jackman has nuts hanging off of his neck. The rest of the short is him spilling sauce on them, wiping the balls with a napkin, the balls shrinking because of the air conditioning, and all other sorts of testicular hilarity.
Most of the other sketches suffer from this same one joke problem. Anna Faris wants to take her relationship to the next level by having her boyfriend poop on her face. Chloe Grace Moretz has her first period and menstruates through her pants at a male friend’s house. Batman and Robin go speed dating with Lois Lane and Supergirl. Halle Berry plays Truth or Dare with some British douche on a blind date, that quickly escalates to them doing outrageous things… like getting tattoos of penises put on their faces… how fucking hysterical.
You see, all those descriptions of the sketches double as their jokes… their only jokes. Jokes that aren’t funny in the first place, but that are then repeated, drawn out, and hammered into the ground to the point where I wanted to seek solace by cutting my wrists with a rusted butter knife. And I haven’t even gotten to the two worst ones, the two that go way beyond being simply unfunny and become downright offensive. One features real life Hollywood couple Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts as deranged parents who home school their teenage son, and want to give him the “complete high school experience,” by bullying him, hazing him, and simulating a date with him… in which Watts gives her son his “first kiss”… don’t ask, just don’t fucking ask.
Now, we arrive at the very worst of the lot, which features Terrence Howard as the coach of an all black high school basketball team going up against an all white basketball team… and do I even need to tell you what this one’s central (i.e. only) gag is? Well, Howard himself repeats this one throughout the bit, as if trying so desperately to ram it through our heads how ingeniously hilarious it’s supposed to be… the all black team will annihilate the other team because they’re all white. Hardy-fucking-Har! So funny I forgot to laugh.
I don’t know how much clearer I can make it, folks, Movie 43 is absolutely worthless on every level. How so many talented people were tricked into partaking in this steaming pile of fail has to be one of the most baffling mysteries of our time, and watching them try so hard to make this pathetically imbecilic material work is as sad as it is wrenchingly painful. It is, by a mile, the worst film of 2013 that I’ve seen, and the thought of coming upon one this year that somehow manages to be even worse is frightening beyond comprehension. This epic piece of Razzie bait has garnered its much deserved reputation for a reason, and unless the sight of Gerard Butler playing a demented leprechaun tickles your fancy, there is no reason for you, or anyone else, to go anywhere near this colossal shit-bomb.
