Drillbit Tayor is a U.S. army deserter who lives in the bushes next to a California beach. I guess John Edwards was right about those homeless vets, but not in the way he intended to be.
Drillbit is played by Owen Wilson, which likely makes him the most carefree non-crazy homeless person in the history of cinema. Come to think of it, for a guy the film finds charming and resourceful, Drillbit’s daily nude shower on the beach makes the film wheeze for air before the opening credits have concluded. Stretch sitcom gimmicks too far, and it’s difficult to laugh. Allow me to supply a better sitcom cliché: Drillbit should be fired from a menial job at the start of the film and retreat to his rat’s nest apartment, where he finds his exasperated girlfriend throwing his stuff out the window. Better, but then again I’m not being paid to write crappy PG-13 comedies, just okay movie reviews.
While surfing the web on a stranger’s laptop, Drillbit stumbles across an ad for a bodyguard. He meets Wade (Nate Hartley) and Ryan (Troy Gentile), two dweeb freshmen getting brutalized by school bullies. When asked about his credentials, Drillbit claims “I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.” If these kids were fans of “Blade Runner,” they’d recognize this as part of one of the most beautiful moments in cinematic history and tell this clown to get lost. Oh wait, it turns out they are “Blade Runner” fans, but they hire him anyway.
Viewers of “Drillbit Taylor” will come to expect this sort of flippant writing through the course of the film, which spurns anything that so much as resembles continuity, a theme, or realism. The shoddiness of the affair is often difficult to watch, the need for rewriters so obvious that it’s startling the film was shot in the first place.
Consider the 14-year-old protagonists and their mysterious knowledge of pop culture in which their writers lived but they didn’t. Or the savagery of the bullies, who commit so many felonies that I regretted using up that gimmick when I listed off unpunished crimes in my “Charlie Bartlett” review. These bullies don’t just call their victims names, but they pummel them, try to run them down with their car, and menace them with swords. Mix bullies a quarter this bad with evil losers, and you get Columbine-style shootings.
Drillbit doesn’t do much to help these pathetic creatures, spending most of his time stealing their stuff and practicing coitus with the hot English teacher (Leslie Mann, who had an ill-fated date with Wilson in “The Cable Guy”). With bodyguards like these, who needs bullies?
The film is saved from a 0 star rating solely by Wilson’s slacker charm, which even this mess can’t dilute. His “aww-shucks” appeal is significant and works well in both drama and comedy, though it’s too bad that the guy has to headline garbage like this to make the Maserati payments. No wonder he’s so depressed.
To the film’s credit, there is one pricelessly funny joke. You’ll know it when you see it. On second thought, don’t see it.
1 out of 5
1 comments:
It seems like you have been seeing mostly less-than-2.5-star movies lately. That's a shame.
I wonder if we are getting too smart for movies, or are there just a whole lot more crappy movies than there used to be?
Well, that's kind of a stupid thing to say, there are probably plenty of good movies out there, its just that the good ones are not funded by major studios and don't get distributed to all the cinemas in the US. So I guess the really good movies aren't big enough to wind up in small-town theaters across the nation.
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