Watched: Tusk (2014).
This is the first film featuring Johnny Depp that’s made me grind my teeth whenever he’s on-screen - and, yes, I’m including Alice in Wonderland. Here, he plays a Québécois ex-detective who’s clearly intended to be the comic relief but instead comes across as painfully boring, meandering through sentences and over-pronouncing curse words as if he’s making some brilliantly witty pronouncement.
I mention Depp first because in a sense, he’s a perfect symbol for the film as a whole - it’s almost militant in the way that it asserts its determination to play specifically to fans of Kevin Smith, and to pretty much no-one else. The whole thing feels like one long, played-out juvenile joke, except it isn’t funny. The central premise - an old man, plagued by his past, sews an unsuspecting traveler into a walrus suit so he can finally confront his personal demons - is unabashedly silly, but can’t quite decide if it wants to be silly or not. Michael Parks is sometimes sinister and enigmatic, but at other times is annoyingly facile, a mish-mash of tropes that ultimately feel empty.
There’s also the fact that the protagonist, played by Justin Long, is someone you immediately root against - he’s a shock-jock podcaster, running a show hilariously called “The Not-See Party”, and is in Canada in the first place to make fun of a kid who accidentally cut his own leg off while on camera. (That’s the level of humor we’re dealing with, here.) That’s all fine, of course - Long’s character hardly lives happily ever after - but we’re somehow supposed to believe that his friend and girlfriend care about him enough to fly out to Canada and track him down. It ultimately just feels empty - depressing, even.
I’ve liked Kevin Smith’s films before, divisive as they are, because they quite often use dumb jokes and tired stereotypes to get at something more fundamental; the dénouement of Clerks still impresses me, and I think there’s something to be said about Dogma as a heightened, ridiculous buddy movie. Somewhere along the line, though, he seems to have stopped caring, forgetting that without the strands of deeper meaning, we’re left with an artifice that is deeply unpleasant and utterly monotonous to engage with.