Very Bad Things - Apes in the Suburbs

Aug

9

Very Bad Things - Apes in the Suburbs

≡ Category: Movie Reviews By Country, Recommended, Satire |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Satire
Director: Peter Berg
Year: 1998

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

I reluctantly recommend Very Bad Things, but I’ve got to warn you that you probably won’t enjoy it much. More on that later.

Very Bad Things is the blackest of black comedies. Well, it’s actually a savage farce.

Here’s the basic setup. Kyle Fisher (Jon Favreau) is getting married to Laura Garrety (Cameron Diaz). Before the wedding, the groom decides to have a bachelor party in Vegas with his buddies Robert (Christian Slater), Michael (Jeremy Piven), and Adam (Daniel Stern). The bachelor party goes wildly wrong and a coverup ensues, with disastrous consequences for everyone involved. Doesn’t exactly sound like a laff riot, does it?

The comedy derives from lampooning various aspects of the American character. When in each other’s company, the men regress to cavemen-like buffoons. Cameron Diaz is almost as bad, with her obsession with the perfect wedding.

It seems like everyone wants what they want, and they don’t care who they have to hurt to get it. Ethical considerations are given lip service, but in the end, pure animalism triumphs.

I think writer/director Peter Berg is saying that civilization is but a thin gloss over tooth and claw. Not an original idea, perhaps, but when filtered through the prism of American culture, it takes on a certain piquancy.

Very Bad Things starts out brilliantly enough. The opening sequences concern the guys’ bachelor party in Vegas. Director Peter Berg films the festivities with an anthropologist’s eye, and it’s a horrifying spectacle. The giant ESPN screen, the mindlessly bombastic pop music, oceans of beer, the sweaty locker room camaraderie — it’s all there, blown up to monstrous proportions, true, but it’s essentially an accurate portrayal.

Then Peter Berg makes a decision which is so wrongheaded, it causes his movie to effectively commit suicide.

***SPOILER ALERT***

I don’t usually have spoilers in my reviews, but I’ll have to make an exception for Very Bad Things because there is no way to talk about what is wrong with the movie otherwise.

While the guys are partying in their hotel suite, Tina (Kobé Tai) arrives at the door. She’s the entertainment for the evening. After performing a striptease, she goes into the bathroom to have sex with Michael, and is subsequently killed. This event sets in motion the rest of the plot.

This plot element in itself isn’t inherently bad. Peter’s Berg’s mistake is the casting of Tina’s character. As played by Kobé Tai, Tina is a life force. She bubbles with energy and brio, she’s surreally beautiful and young and delicious, and worst of all, she’s vulnerable. Tina has seen these sorts of celebrations before and she knows what kind of yahoos she’s dealing with. When she says to Michael, “Please be gentle with me,” it breaks your heart.

Let me be clear that I am not knocking Kobé Tai’s performance. She is touching. She has charisma out the ying-yang. If Hollywood had the slightest clue, her performance in Very Bad Things would have led to a burgeoning career doing romantic comedies and television. (Well, the only problem Kobé Tai might have is that she’s so beautiful that other women might find her threatening.)

Kobé Tai is by far the most real thing in the movie. When her character Tina dies, the life goes out of the movie, never to return.

The problem is, Very Bad Things operates on the level of farce, of grotesque exaggeration. It allows you some distance. Tina is pitched at the level of gut level reality. When she’s snuffed, it registers like a real life death, and the movie cannot survive this rupture of its established style.

Other innocents die, but they are not presented with the same sense of reality and vibrancy as Tina, so they fit with the overall style of Very Bad Things.

*** END OF SPOILER ALERT***

The rest of Very Bad Things plays out competently enough, as the boys try to cover up what happened in Vegas.

People die or endure horrible injuries in Very Bad Things with alarming frequency, but it can be played for laughs because you really don’t care what happens to these characters. No, I take that back. You want them all to get completely screwed.

The trailer says very good people are doing very bad things, but that is a lie. These people are basically all monsters.

Very Bad Things is a jolly anthropological exploration of the inherent savagery of human beings, and it would be a lot of fun on that level if it weren’t for the misstep I mentioned in my spoiler.

Still, first time writer/director Peter Berg proves that he has a sharp, original comic vision and abundant directing chops. For that reason, Very Bad Things is worth checking out. Just don’t be surprised if you’re depressed after the credits roll.