Movie Review: Movie 43

Movie Review: Movie 43

Relativity Media

Christopher Mintz-Plasse stars in Relativity Media's Movie 43.

As a film critic, I’ve seen nearly 4,000 movies over the last fifteen years. Right now, I can’t think of one worse than “Movie 43.”

If you gave a group of clinically sociopathic teenage boys the keys to Hollywood, they would come up with something better than this colossal waste of talent, time, and money.

Though cult comedies like 1977’s “Kentucky Fried Movie” may have provided initial inspiration, the true motivating factor seems to have been some sort of dare: how many superstars could producer Peter Farrelly convince to humiliate themselves?

The answer, bafflingly, is way too many. The premise here is that wanna-be director Charlie (Dennis Quaid) is pitching his ideas for a sketch-comedy film to a studio executive (Greg Kinnear). We watch as Charlie’s ideas unfold in a series of surreally unfunny short films.

The first, directed by Farrelly, brings us on a blind date with two attractive Manhattanites (Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman). The twist? That Jackman has testicles hanging from his neck. That’s it. And believe it or not, things go downhill from there.

Anna Faris’s character wants her boyfriend (Chris Pratt) to perform a scatological sex act that we’re forced to view in full color. Halle Berry makes guacamole with her (prosthetic) breasts. Chloe Grace Moretz gets her period for the first time, which panics and disgusts everyone around her. Elizabeth Banks is urinated on by a cartoon cat, who has graphic sexual fantasies about Josh Duhamel.

Ironically enough, Seth MacFarlaneâ€"an expert at packaging the profaneâ€"is one of the few celebrities to play himself. Couldn’t he have stepped in with some advice while he was on set?

Presumably, Farrelly has dirt on half his industry; there is no other explanation for the participation of so many major names. (Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Gerard Butler, Kristen Bell, Terrence Howard, Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber will want to scrub this one off their resumes. With bleach.)

As inane as the above ideas sound, they are far worse in execution. There is truly not a single well-crafted joke among them. Despite the filmmakers’ desperate attempts to scandalize us, the only real shock is that a movie this disastrous ever managed to get made.