BEFORE: Not much going on - another weekend where it was too hot to leave the house. We toyed with the idea of driving upstate to find a county fair, but when the time comes, we're just not motivated to drive two hours up to Orange County. Maybe next weekend.
Cameron Diaz carries over from "In Her Shoes".
THE PLOT: A prostitute is killed during a bachelor party and the attendees turn on each other as the wedding approaches.
AFTER: I want to be helpful here, so if you've never seen this film, I recommend that you not bother, it's not worth your time. I'm now wishing I could get my time spent watching this BACK, but I've already made the sacrifice so there's not much I can do, just try to spare other people from making the same mistake as I did. There are no new ideas in Hollywood, and just as "Frankenstein" and "My Fair Lady" are essentially the same story, Hollywood later told a very similar story in the film "Rough Night", only they gender-swapped everything to create a story of a wild bachelorette party with a dead MALE stripper, instead of a bachelor party with a dead female stripper. Umm, we've come a long way since 1998, I guess?
And wow, Christian Slater was really typecast there for a while as the fun-loving psychotic character - this is really the same character he played in "Heathers", released 10 years before. In both cases one accidental death needs covering up, and the quickest, most efficient and also WRONGest way to cover it up is with another death, either intentional or not. And then another, and then another - was Slater just the go-to actor for the character who's at the middle of all this, that you eventually figure out might just be a person who enjoys killing, and doesn't have his head screwed on right? But from what I remember about "Heathers", it all built to an illogical but still satisfying conclusion, and here it just feels like the screenwriters kept painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner, with no idea about how they were going to write their way out of it. Eventually it feels like they just threw their hands up in the air and gave up.
Another thing that's come a long way since 1998 is Las Vegas, or so I hope. We're planning a trip now to take place in October, and we haven't been there since 2003, it turns out. We noticed in 2003 that the place had become a lot more family-friendly, thanks to places like the m&m Store, Hershey's World, a ton of fine dining restaurants and a whole lot more shopping. Plus we went to Siegfried & Roy's zoo...sorry "secret garden"...where they believe in the superiority of the white tiger over all the other, non-Aryan tigers. Anyway, it's not the hooker-prominent, showgirl-laden adult wonderland that it used to be - I'm sure there are still strip clubs there, but it's now a place you can go with your kids, you just have to put them to bed before hitting the casino. We've seen the change happen with Atlantic City, too, a renewed emphasis on shopping malls, roller coasters, chain restaurants, and those cheezy wax figure museums or franchises like "Ripley's Believe it or Not!" outposts.
Anyway, the last I heard, prostitution was legal in Nevada in every place BUT Las Vegas, so go figure out that one. I guess some screenwriter here didn't get the memo, or else he assumed that where there's a will (or a john) there's a way. But it's a major problem that the kick-off point for all the action in the film is the assumption that it's so easy to go to Vegas, get a stripper and a pile of cocaine, and just start going hog wild. Like this is the most normal thing to do - neither of my bachelor parties were anything close to this, I think for the first one I was bowling in Cleveland, and the second time around I just had a nice quiet dinner with my best man. I don't really remember the second one, but that's a good thing, since there were no strippers to pay off or bodies to clean up, right?
Naturally a couple of the bachelors here want to call the police, but one party member takes control of the conversation and explains why that would be the WORST thing to do - because then they'd ALL have to admit they were doing coke, and acting wild, and getting lap dances. God forbid, no, it's much easier to chop up a body and bury it out in the desert - I'd like to see the stats on this, I for one would rather have to do the paperwork on an accidental death then use a shovel and dig a grave. But maybe that's just me.
Much like "1922", this film seems deeply derived from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", because it's guilt that drives the actions of the murderer(s) and causes things to spiral out of control. But there are things portrayed in this movie that just seem to come from a place of callousness, like there's an overarching karmic force that wants everyone's story to end badly. Why? Were they horrible people to begin with? Good people that did a bad thing, or is that not possible, does doing a bad thing automatically make them a bad person, by default? And then, logically, they deserve to die? That's not how the legal system works, and we'd like to think that's not how the ultimate judgment, the afterlife system, works either.
At least in the religious models of judgment, and in our penal system as well, there's a chance of redemption - but some writers and filmmakers decided that's too good for our central characters here, they will get no redemption, it's not an option that's on the table. Whatever bad blood exists between two brothers, or two friends, or a bride and a groom, that's a fatal flaw, and unless it's discussed openly or hashed out in some fashion, it's going to fester and rot, and become fatal in some unexpected way.
I kept thinking there was going to be some kind of redemptive or even a fake-out ending. Like all they had to do to negate all the bad nastiness and unredeemable behavior in this film was to add an ending that reveals this has all been a dream, or a story told by one person to another. Just have Cameron Diaz saying to Jon Favreau something like, "...and THAT'S why I don't want you to go to Vegas for a bachelor party!" See, all is forgiven, it never happened, but no, we can't be that lucky. No redemption is going to come, people are doomed to die or be left crippled or stuck raising someone else's kids, and their life is going to become hell on earth. Where have all the good times gone?
Also starring Jon Favreau (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Christian Slater (last seen in archive footage in "The End of the Tour"), Daniel Stern (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Jeremy Piven (last seen in "The Grifters"), Leland Orser (last seen in "Taken 3"), Jeanne Tripplehorn (last seen in "Swept Away"), Joey Zimmerman, Tyler Malinger, Kobe Tai, Russell B. McKenzie, Lawrence Pressman (last seen in "American Dreamz"), Bob Bancroft and a cameo from Peter Berg.
RATING: 2 out of 10 hazmat suits
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