Fool's Paradise
The big boy version of Little Miss Sunshine: pretentious, hypocritical as fuck, vacuous and lightweight. Charlie Day is not Charlie Chaplin, I’m sorry, they just share a first name.
It’s not that the “satire” is weak, the film is also not a comedy nor a drama. It’s an absolute nothingburger, the polar opposite of something like RoboCop.
It’s cringeworthy, the way they try to introduce political themes, by having the ersatz Koch brothers playing by an extra and John Malkovich hamming it up like a pro. The contrast is so big, you see Malkovich in one scene completely eviscerating every single actor in the rest of the film, when his tone approaches Burn After Reading.
Even the Hollywood references are bad. Common is Dagger, some washout hobo, clearly based on Wesley Snipes, without the criminal background. Motherfucker, are you out of your damn mind? And the annoying agent, oh my god, what an annoying snivelling shit. What’s his arc? Is he pitiful, or a worthless human being? His big emotional scene is cut down by jokes, I can’t tell.
The incredible part is that the Always Sunny alumni don’t show up enough to ruin the film, that’s real talent right there.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.