Z/Web

This was very different from what I expected. I thought it was a lame comedy about sperm donor switching, but it turned out to be a semi-sweet tale about a shy dork who “accidentally” helps his best friend get pregnant and later realizes he has to tell her the kid she got is his.

There are some really good moments, especially with the dad as he connects with the weird kid (who is like his father), but the whole film feels awkward, as though there isn’t a laugh track when there should be. It feels like stuff is trying to be funny but isn’t. I think it’s a case of a film that isn’t sure what it is — a serious drama or a comedy.

Another serious problem is that the central premise is just too absurd. When I first heard of the concept, I assumed it was something like a lab mixup that mislabled the sperm samples, but it’s nothing like that at all. They worked hard to make it believable and it almost gets there, but in the end it’s just too farfetched and that weakens the entire film. Such ridiculousness works for a silly comedy, but not for a drama, and this feels much more like the later, meaning that the flawed concept equals a flawed film.

Still, it’s better than I expected. The kid-dad stuff was really sweet and made the film worth watching for me.

Wow, is this film violent! I kid you not: this is the most violent film I’ve ever seen. Hundreds of gruesome deaths and injuries. It makes Robocop seem mild. It’s not just the deaths of the bad guys (I’m all for that), but even our heros have horrible things happen to them. (Not to spoil things, but in one scene our hobo hero chews glass. Yeah, fun to watch. Not.)

Just the title had me intrigued and eager to check it out, but unfortunately the setting of this film is just too depressing for me to enjoy it. It’s set in some sort of lawless city where a Bad Dude and his sons run everything and literally kill people for sport. It’s really a sick place and there isn’t much hope shown. There were a few tender moments between our main characters, the hobo and the prostitute he rescued, and I liked that, but they were too brief and so much bad stuff happens to them that it’s really difficult to watch.

A lot of ultraviolent movies get away with it because the violence is cartoony or there’s a great sense of humor about things. This has that, to an extent, but the humor falls flat when it’s our heros getting their heads sawed off or arm chewed up. We can laugh when bad stuff happens to the bad guy, but we have to suffer along with our heros, and that made this film not very enjoyable to me.

I liked a lot of it — it’s stylishly shot, the plot is decent (standard revenge story), and the performances good (especially Rutger Hauer in the lead role) — but ultimately I didn’t enjoy it. Weird film in that regard, for I wanted to like it a lot. I’m still glad I saw it as it is interesting, but it’s definitely distasteful and caution should be exercised before viewing.