The Machine

Directed by Peter Atencio, The Machine follows comedian Bert Kreischer as he’s kidnapped and forced to travel to Russia to retrieve a valuable antique he stole decades earlier. It’s an intriguing premise that is, at the outset, employed to surprisingly agreeable and watchable effect, as Atencio, armed with a script by Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes, delivers an appealingly low-key comedy that effectively establishes Kreischer and his fractured relationship with his family – with the passable atmosphere heightened by Kreischer’s better-than-expected central performance (ie he’s toned down his larger-than-life stage persona drastically). There’s little doubt, then, that The Machine‘s slow-but-steady descent into complete irrelevance is triggered by an increasingly intolerable midsection, as the picture begins to adopt a generic action-movie sensibility that grows more and more tiresome as time progresses – with the arms-length atmosphere exacerbated by an ongoing emphasis on tedious, underwhelming set-pieces (eg Bert gets high in the woods, Bert’s father (Mark Hamill’s Albert) parties with Russian gangsters, etc). By the time the overblown and rather interminable third act rolls around, The Machine has cemented its place as a total misfire that ultimately has no business running 112 minutes (ie this thing should’ve topped out at 80 minutes max).

*1/2 out of ****