Movie 43

Sporadically funny yet terminally stupid, Movie 43 collects several short comedy sketches starring A-listers like Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere, Emma Stone, and Terrence Howard – with the movie’s wraparound story following a demented screenwriter (Dennis Quaid’s Charlie) as he pitches his ideas at gunpoint to an off-kilter executive (Greg Kinnear’s Griffin). It’s ultimately clear that Movie 43 fares best in its first half, as the film’s opening half hour boasts a number of irresistibly amusing shorts – including a fantastic bit of silliness featuring Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber as parents who take the home-schooling concept to impressively dark places. And although some of these sketches just don’t work (eg Jackman plays a man with testicles dangling from his chin), the film boasts a pervasively affable vibe that does, for a little while, compensate for the less-than-compelling stretches contained within. It’s just as clear, however, that the law of diminishing returns comes into effect somewhere around the midway point, as Movie 43 is, to an increasingly distressing degree, suffused with sketches of an irredeemably pointless and, far more problematic, hopelessly unfunny nature – including a seemingly endless effort in which Batman (Jason Sudeikis) wreaks havoc on Robin’s (Justin Long) dating endeavors. The film is subsequently rife with skits that are either disastrously overlong (eg a promising first-date scenario between Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant devolves into gross-out humor) or flat-out misguided (eg Gere plays an executive faced with an unusual marketing issue), and although the late-in-the-game inclusion of James Gunn’s amusing short about a cartoon cat temporarily elevates the proceedings, Movie 43 has long-since established itself as a painfully erratic endeavor that does, generally speaking, fare worse than a garden-variety episode of Saturday Night Live.

** out of ****