Movie 43 Review

The film was assembled over four years, whenever the cast happened to be free, and the shape of it follows from that. Thirteen directors and a long list of writers each deliver a sketch, stitched together by a story about a screenwriter pitching an executive. In the United States that frame is the pitch meeting; internationally it is three teenagers hunting a banned film. Neither version builds to anything, because there is nothing underneath to build toward.

The trouble is not that the sketches are crude. It is that nearly every one has the same architecture: a premise announced in the first thirty seconds, then four minutes of the cast reacting to that premise while it fails to develop. A man has an anatomical feature on his neck, and the scene is his date noticing it repeatedly. A boy's date is horrified by menstruation, and the scene is a family panicking about it repeatedly. Sketch comedy lives on escalation, and there is almost none here.

The cast is the one real asset and it is spent badly. Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Chloe Grace Moretz and many others play everything straight, which is the correct instinct and occasionally almost rescues a bit. The middle school date sketch and the animated cat that closes the picture each contain a genuine comic idea. Two workable ideas in ninety four minutes is not a rate anybody can defend, and the Razzies gave it worst picture of its year.