I’m So Excited!

A comedy without any laughs, I’m So Excited! follows the passengers and crew of a Mexico City-bound airplane as they prepare for a possible crash landing by drinking, doing drugs, and having sex. Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar establishes I’m So Excited!‘s tone of unfocused irreverence right off the bat, as the movie opens with amusing yet fairly pointless cameo appearances by Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz (ie Almodóvar seems to have enlisted the pair not for any specific, compelling reason but merely because he could). From there, I’m So Excited! segues into a middling, meandering narrative with little in the way of context or character development – with Almodóvar’s recurring emphasis on decidedly surreal elements and oddball cutaways perpetuating the movie’s sketch-comedy atmosphere. And while there are a few subplots that fare comparatively well – eg one of the passengers calls home and inadvertently prevents a woman from committing suicide – I’m So Excited! suffers from an almost total lack of compelling elements that slowly-but-surely transforms the whole thing into a fairly interminable experience. It’s ultimately impossible not to wonder just what Almodóvar originally set out to accomplish with this disastrous in-joke of a picture, and the movie certainly confirms the feeling that the erratic filmmaker is at his best when focused on stories with a more overtly dramatic bent.

*1/2 out of ****