UNFUNNY BUSINESS
Inappropriate Comedy a bottom-feeding bomb,
InAPPropriate Comedy is an equal-opportunity offender that proves a roomful of chimps working keyboards can come up with something other than Shakespeare. Slap Chop and ShamWow! TV pitchman Vince Offer, who directs this lazy mess, revisits the racist, stupid, gross-out formula he mined with1999’s The Underground Comedy Movie. That bomb starred Joey Buttafuoco, the Long Island mechanic whose ill-fated affair with teenager Amy Fisher led to his wife’s shooting. Now he’s got himself an Oscar winner, casting Adrien Brody as Flirty Harry, a flinty-eyed cop dressed in Capri pants who sneers, “Go ahead, make me gay,” to criminals. The rest of the dialogue consists of every double entendre ever spoken relating to homosexuality. The only thing missing is the elbow to the ribs and a bellowed: “Get it?” Does Brody need the money that badly? InAPPropriate co-stars Lindsay Lohan (in a predictable gag where she takes on the paparazzi) and SNL alum Rob Schneider, whose careers have been circling the drain for such a long time, they must be glad of the work. Perhaps they were inspired by Movie 43, in which some of Hollywood’s hottest actors got down and dirty for bargain-basement yucks — making $4.8 million in its opening weekend in January while earning a bottom-feeding 4 per cent rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The lone holdout publication that liked the movie was TV Guide. Star critic Peter Howell called Movie 43 the worst movie he’s ever seen. Now we have something in common.
A series of stupid sketches that “play” when the app is selected by Offer on the devil’s iPad, these stream-of-consciousness set-ups sound like they were penned by 17year-olds locked in a room for a weekend with a few cases of Red Bull and a stack of porn flicks. The rest of the gags have been around since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The trailer tells you the whole story.
It’s not the nature of the material that is so annoying, it’s the lazy, sloppy movie that it has been stitched into, a lurching Frankenstein of recycled ideas cloaked in a stunning lack of originality.
There’s no mystery why this movie wasn’t screened for critics prior to release, coupled with an embargo on publication until Saturday.
The set-ups are often racist and always ridiculous, usually involving simulated sex, body parts, buckets of sticky fluids, and various acts of grossity. These one-joke gags repeat punch lines over and over.
Spend your dough on more worthwhile multiplex efforts and let this one rot at the back of the fridge.