dir. Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim
Rating: ✮✮1/2
Once again proving the Law of Sketch Comedy Not Translating Well to the Big Screen, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie takes their by turns brilliant, repulsive, and occasionally downright awful (intentionally and otherwise) sketch TV work and expands it from 11 minute packets of delirious lunacy into a 90 minute manifesto that, like the Strangers With Candy movie before it, makes one yearn for the more focused craziness of the TV show that spawned it.
Their Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! boasted hilariously scathing parodies of trash culture, from hideous infomercials to wretched 80s rock videos, B-movies and, my personal favorite, small town TV news, in the form of "Married News Team" Jan and Wayne Skylar (assisted by the terminally clueless Dr. Steve Brule, played by John C. Reilly, who shows up here in a different role). Whereas those shows thrived on the menagerie of grotesque Americana characters constantly hurled at the screen, "B$M" focuses almost exclusively on the titular duo's fictional counterparts, and while the in-universe Tim and Eric make for amusing straight men to the ridiculous goings-on around them in their TV incarnations, their constant presence here eventually proves off-putting. Heidecker and Wareheim predictably ratchet up the f-bombs, violence and body humor--to alarming degrees in the latter case--but somehow fail to recognize that part of what made their skit work so funny was the barriers imposed upon them by standards and practices, and the often disturbing ways they subverted them. Here, with no such limitations, they go off the deep end into full blown frat house humor. Worse still, the celebrity cameos ("Chef" Goldblum aside) are distracting and mostly unfunny--Zach Galifianakis is cringe-worthy as always, in a bad way--and the mean-streak that lurked within Tom Goes to the Mayor and Awesome Show becomes far too prominent, lending many of the jokes and the film's climax a nasty aftertaste.
Granted, it's all still pretty amusing, and the duo sporadically manage to deliver the kind of brilliantly hilarious nightmare fuel that is their stock and trade, but they fail to fully capitalize on their abandoned shopping mall locale and the opportunities for biting satire it presents. Nevertheless, the absurdly horrific revelation of "Shrim" will surely linger in audience's minds long after they've left the cinema (or their rental window has expired)--for better or worse.
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