2003
Rated: Unrated
Genre: Comedy
Directed By: Nick Clark
Running Time: 1:21
Review by: Lillian Patterson
Review Date: 11/16/07
Special Features:
Trailers
THE ULTIMATE TRUTH

 

Everyone in the movie gives a believable performance. The actors really inhabit their roles, and they each fit the unique, quirky role they've been given.

Where do I start? Ok, first of all, the accents in this movie are so thick that subtitles would have really helped, because it's very difficult to understand what the characters are saying at times. I should say that I'm a fan of quirky British comedies. I seek them out, so I was excited to see this movie. I don't really know where it went wrong, but it did so early on. The lead character is a slacker who doesn't do much with his life, but one night on a date with his girlfriend he accosts some guy who puts the moves on her, and the subsequent brush with the police and his girlfriend's pleading are enough to convince him that he should do something with his life, so he decided to become politically active.  Meanwhile the man he assaulted in the bar has problems with his overbearing father, and everyone seems to be obsessed with his penis.

This whole movie is obsessed with penises. I'm a huge fan of cock, don't get me wrong, but we don't get to see any actual penis in this movie, and thus hearing everyone talk about it endlessly got old, even for me. One of the characters (the leader of a militia group) philosophizes that everything in a man's life revolves around the size of his penis, and I
think perhaps the filmmakers were throwing that line in here to justify making a movie that revolves around penis jokes. I don't know if the filmmakers realize the line between being edgily funny and being strange and uncomfortable, but seeing a father grope his son's penis while talking about the "strength of his seed" really isn't edgy or funny, it's just weird. Seeing a strange old man crawl under the hospitalized son's covers and sexually assault him while he's in the hospital? Also not funny.

The only thing that even keys me into the fact that these scenes are supposed to be funny is the quirky soundtrack playing in the background of the scenes, but I was caught between being appalled and being bored, until finally the boredom won over. I've decided not to take offense, I'm sure the movie was trying to be offensive and  funny but ultimately, it ends up being boring more than anything else. Boring and very, very weird.  

This movie is full of weird things. The aforementioned militia group is weird, and the guy who leads it acts a lot tougher and cooler than he is, and the guys in the group don't really respect him and mock him a lot and he makes a lot of speeches about how they would be nothing without him. Meanwhile another local young man has some kind of epiphany when sitting watching the television, and he starts to run around spouting political philosophy at every turn, worrying his over-attentive parents into thinking he's an anarchist.

Needless to say, as anyone could predict, the young man runs into the lead character and his friends and they decide to start doing political activism together (as members of "The Green Party") and they chain themselves to trees, meanwhile the father who was groping his son is also active in political circles, and he wants to expose the newly christened "Green Party" crusaders for the reprobates he believes they are, and everything comes to a head when the father holds a political social gathering at his house and the "Green Party" and the militia show up, and the son gets to confront the man who assaulted him, and the idealists learn a lesson of sorts, and I hope I'm not making this sound interesting and enticing you to watch it, because I'd hate to have you sit through what I had to sit through.

I feel terrible saying all of this. I love and respect independent cinema and I want it to succeed, but I feel I'd be a hypocrite if I took mainstream movies to task for their shortcomings but failed to do so with indie films as well. I like to think that I have a sense of humor, and I tried very hard to find something funny about this movie, but I couldn't. The only positive thing I can think of to say about this movie is that the actors do a good job, because they do, and they really do inhabit their roles... I just hope they find a project in the future that allows them to use their skills in a worthwhile film. I'm really sorry, but this just ain't it.

 

 

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