Arthur (Movie; RomCom)

ARTHUR

Release: April, 2011

Genre: Romantic Comedy

I got suckered into seeing this movie recently and lost what could have been two very productive hours of my life.  Even if the time wasn’t used productively, I’d rather have stayed in the parking lot making a tiny beige Stonehenge out of discarded cigarette butts.  Arthur is a remake of the 1981 film, this time starring Russell Brand as the lead unlikable oaf.  Honestly, this film could’ve bit the bullet of self-parody and ran under the name of ‘Two Hours (That You Will Never Get Back) of Adventures by Several Wholly Uninteresting, Unlikable People’, and it might have less staggeringly awful.  I’m not going to write this review with a really nasty, hateful outlook because it’s fun to be mean. I’m going to write an honest, open review. This movie was terrible.

The story is simple and you’ve probably heard it before: as heir to his emotionally unavailable mother’s functionally-unlimited fortune, Brand has lived a posh existence without ever becoming a real person. His wild antics cause some sort of scene, and his mother cuts him off unless he marries an interchangeable female character (this one is evil). He almost does, but instead falls for another interchangeable female character (this one is good). If he doesn’t marry the evil one, he loses all his money. He wants to live his childish life, but doesn’t want to be scolded every day. So he runs from the evil marriage, and decides to be in love with the good one. Then his mother forgives him, and he gets to keep all the money.  It’s everything you could see in a weekday soap opera, but this one has more prostitutes to make it more…appealing? To my demographic? The boyfriend that got taken to see a romantic comedy? Who knows? 

The film attempts to convey the lesson of ‘love and happiness mean more than material wealth, but thanks to the shoe-horned ending where the guy gets the girl as well as the fabulous, care-free wealthy lifestyle, the lesson concludes with ‘but you should just be rich anyway’.

Brand may be hilarious in his stand up—or not; I haven’t seen any of his material.  Whether or not he is some kind of comic genius off camera lends him no credit when with his perma-drunk yelping voice, he is regurgitating lines that the cleverest guy in the script-factory thought up. Every line was delivered with the precision of a boozy sledge hammer, bashing another lame alcohol/sex joke against the tired corpse of a well-beaten horse. Cut and paste the drunk-in-a-sterile-business-environment bit ad nauseam.  If Brand is even a bit like his character in this movie, it’s absolutely incredible that he hasn’t been captured by bandits, hollowed out and vulcanized over a pit of flames with his leather-handbag-textured skin turned into a canoe of sorts. 

Every single character in this movie is completely unlikable: his absent mother, his burnt-out nanny,and  his fiancée.  Even the love of his life is another personality-free, interchangeable female, but this time with a dollop of the indie-film ingredients of spunky, cute, and spontaneous. I guess that is the way movies like to show that a young female character is likable: Make them spontaneous and a bit air-headed. I can picture a awful script factory environment where several grown men are sitting in black pleather chairs discussing how to make a character likable and spontaneous. Ideas are passed around like a peace pipe packed with asbestos and beard trimmings, each one horrible in its own right, but capable of making the next idea somehow infinitely worse. What makes this so awful is the fact that this is the character the movie needs to make into an engaging human being. The good interchangeable female needs to be shown to be a full human being, with complex emotions and an intact personality. Having failed at that, they’ve made the movie into a long series of loosely connected vignettes about a man trying and failing to live like a commoner until he has a panic attack and somehow wins the girl in the end. And the money.( I still don’t get that part.)

I exited the theatre two hours closer to death and with nothing to show for it. Each character in this movie could have been acted by anyone of the same gender and age group. What Russell Brand is for 2011, Adam Sandler was in the 1990’s. Each person was completely devoid of substance or any kind of interesting personality. The script was boring and any chance to have even a semi-interesting romp by a childish billionare was quickly flushed down the toilet when the writers decided that he would just spend his money on women and cars. This movie offers nothing interesting, nothing worthwhile. It succeeded at providing me a chance to sit in a comfortable chair and stare unblinking at a colored rectangle-shaped screen, and for that, I have to give it a 2.0/10. Avoid it at all costs.

Thanks for reading!

W.