Release: Friday, August 3, 2012

[Redbox]

I just got done having my eyeballs tortured after watching what might very well be the least-consequential movie of all time. Certainly of my time. Although vulgar to the max, it’s pretty lean on the funny jokes, and the acting is horrible. Just, horrible.

The promise of an elegant performance from Olivia Munn had me interested first, I’ll admit that right away. Not really delivered on. The next-best-thing, the prospect of an interesting plot. ‘Cool. Alright, I’ll bite.’ Not delivered on. Will I buy it? Well, I hope that’s a promise I don’t deliver on.

What struggled the most in this picture was character development. Well, the characters didn’t even really get created. Possibly not even talked about. Not with any evidence in what was caught on film and then considered final cut anyway. Not one lead role really stands out from one another, and on top of that, not many characters are worthy of being liked. Maybe Audrey (Olivia Munn). She wants a child, yet her husband “isn’t man enough to give it to her.” That’s a crap card to have been dealt and as crappy as it is she remains a pretty optimistic, faithful wife. All the other males in the film are pretty scumbaggy but make for some pathetic “I feel for you” kind of  guffaws. Unlikeable characters or no character appeal at all makes it difficult to engage in a story that’s as outlandish as this. The bare-bones plot winds up with Tommy (Paul Schneider) caught in a tough spot between the police — having just robbed a sperm bank — and getting his wife pregnant with a saved and still-frozen sample of his own semen from five years ago. Armed with only the tube, he makes a getaway and the two have a happy ending. Yayyy!!! Just don’t worry about how contrived and utterly gross it was in getting to that part.

If you can simply get over the sheer stupidity of the whole thing, there’s actually a few moments that are really damn funny in The Babymakers. But that’s one heck of a challenge.

“Hand over the jizz and get down on the ground now!”

Yeah.

That’s probably the best line in the film. My favorite, anyway. From there there are really just increments of a mix of stupidity, vulgarity and redundancy. And I am not really ever one to take offense to some of the cruder things that people can do or say, but when it’s the overriding theme here, it gets old really quickly. And more to the point, the jokes are heavy on the sex theme, which can get’cha every now and then but not at this level.

It’s definitely tasteless. Funny, at times…okay, yeah, maybe. With the right headphones. But it’s not enough to base a good movie on apparently.

Maybe director Jay Chandrasekhar just didn’t or wouldn’t do it well enough.

We begin with a couple who are longing to have a child, but seem to be having trouble and that center of attention ends up falling more on our anti-man-hero husband Tommy. When he and his disproportionately attractive wife try all sorts of things to have a natural pregnancy, and it doesn’t work, he still insists he doesn’t have an issue. But to be sure, he and his wife visit a doctor who informs him he does not possess ‘healthy’ sperm. In fact, he’s told his sperm are confused. Talk about personal. But Tommy continues to refuse to believe he is incapable of doing the deed with his wife and it’s a belief that begins to interfere with the marriage. So he turns to the questionable aid of his bonehead friends, Darrell, Wade and Zig-Zag. They join forces with a semi-sketchy former Indian mafia thug named Ron Jon (played by none other than our trusty director Jay). It’s basically this twit’s job to inform Tommy and the guys that Tommy is fucked for having a family if he can’t retrieve his own sperm sample — more frequently referred to throughout the film as jizz. So they organize a convoluted plan to break into the donation facility and get it back.

–#cricketchirp–

Predictably the three idiots succeed in screwing up most stages in their harebrained plot — a plot which actually gave them ample room to do just that to begin with. After some terrible slapstick scenes which I’m sure were meant to be hilarious mishaps, Tommy winds up with his only sperm sample left and they leave the place in a much worse condition than how they found it. (Yes, that does imply sperm were harmed during the making of this film.) After watching all this go down and you find yourself struggling to see any logic in this film whatsoever, you’re nearing the end. Well, I suppose if your threshold for raunch is really low that could be near the beginning. . . .After serving several months as a community service worker, Tommy’s free of the awkward looting charges, spared jail time and blessed with a child. And not a Chinese one either, as his wife wanted at first. But they do, yes indeed they do have a child.

Harder to believe than many other silly things in this impotent little romp is the difficulty that this man had in impregnating his wife. I mean. . .she’s beautiful. I’m sure there are more people than just Tommy’s on-screen wife who were wanting to know just what the major malfunction was. If the writing didn’t stoop to grade-level thinking, his major malfunction might have been explained better. Then, maybe, we would have felt sorry for him. But. . . come on. Neither actor — even if Munn and Schneder are B-list — can do much with this writing. It was flat, boring and lifeless. Cliched to all kinds of degrees and horribly one-dimensional. The occasional funny joke was thrown into the mix for good measure, but was more of a sprinkling into their pot of bubbling nonsense.

Wait, nevermind. His incompetence actually was explained. Also inconsequential, it was predictable and pretty lame. Seemed Tommy had a case of getting his tackle hung up around the edges too easily. Every corner or threatening object he could find he would get hit right there at the split of the pant leg. If these incidences weren’t brought back via cheesy flashbacks or happened in real time in just the most unlikely of ways, the joke might have been funny. Make it an actual story about why this guy has a problem with smacking his junk; give it some life and actuality. Some heart. Heck, any sort of meaning whatsoever would have been good. Instead they bypass the heart and go for an easy kick to the groin. What a shame.

Recommendation: Not really a stand-out comedy. Fun for awhile and then it just gets old and stupid. Olivia Munn is a nice addition, but is, just like Schneider, stuck with a worse situation than being infertile: being first-billed names.

Rated: R

Running Time: 93 mins.

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